There are only two things allowed on this stage: paper, and a piano.
Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson reunite on stage for the first time in decades, in a production built almost entirely from paper, concrete and a single piano. Designer Ana Inés Jabares-Pita takes us inside the world she built for them.
Running 9 August – 13 September 2026.
A Mind on Stage
Nothing sits on this stage by accident. Just a set, a piano, and nothing else. It’s built to represent a single mental landscape: memories, fragments, and the space between them.
“I felt to represent that, we needed to have nothing on stage apart from the key elements,” says designer Ana Inés Jabares-Pita, who came to the production having deliberately avoided any trace of its earlier staging. “I was completely new to it. I made it a mission not to see any pictures or anything from the previous version.”
What is a memory, staged?
Paper and Memory
The title isn’t just decorative. Paper is the only material allowed near the show’s props, which are set against a landscape of broken, fragmented concrete, built to evoke shattered lives and half-remembered places.
“Thinking about broken memories and broken lives… each time a paper piece that is significant with a memory comes up, it will trigger a bigger poetic moment in the piece,” Jabares-Pita explains. Each flash is deliberately brief, and gone as quickly as the memory itself.
Watch for what surfaces.
New Looks for Familiar Faces
Costuming two of Scotland’s most recognisable performers meant designing against expectation. “Because Alan has had so many cool looks, it was quite fun trying to find a completely different look from what he’d normally have,” says Jabares-Pita, reworking his silhouette, beard and facial hair from scratch.
The brief throughout: naturalism that never gets in the way, clothes built to move, dance and jump in, and fundamentally nothing that reads as costume at all.
One Design, Two Stages
The production plays at both Pitlochry and Dundee, meaning the designs needed to fit two different stages, but one vision. “My focus was to firstly design for Pitlochry, and then start to implement it in Dundee,” says Jabares-Pita, comparing ground plans until both versions held without compromise.
If she had to sum up the whole design in one word? “Magic.”
Let yourself go
“I want them to go on an emotional journey, to feel transported, and at the end of the show, leave with hope” Jabares-Pita says of what she wants for the audience. “It’s all about the story and the music.”
A History of Paper plays 9 August – 13 September 2026.