Casey Jay Andrews is a master of space. Her career has seen her creating detritus-filled attics (Every Wild Beast), carousel ponies in the woods (A Place that Belongs to Monsters), and ’90’s teen bedrooms that lead to haunted, moonlit labyrinths (Punchdrunk’s Viola’s Room). Based in London, Andrews is a writer and designer with a knack for transporting audiences to worlds of her creation. She works as a designer for the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk and has created puppets and scenic installations internationally. Most recently, she designed Viola’s Room, Punchdrunk’s immersive, gothic mystery narrated by Helena Bonham Carter.
Andrews's written work is intimate, imaginative, and personal. She performs many of her pieces solo, surrounded by sets of her own meticulous design. Blending anecdotes, folklore, interviews, and fables, she weaves disparate ideas into delicate, compelling narratives. Her work is intimate not only in its small scale, but in its honesty—Andrews notes that much of her work contains pieces of her own life. “Whatever message I’m trying to put forward with a show,” she says, “inevitably and invariably, my own experience finds its way in.”
Andrews is an Edinburgh Fringe regular—she first attended the festival in 2009, and first performed in 2012 in collaboration with HookHitch Theatre and Lion House Theatre. Her solo piece The Archive of Educated Hearts won a Fringe First award in 2018 and was a sold-out success in both 2018 and 2019. In it, Andrews uses recorded interviews and personal anecdotes to explore the effect of breast cancer on mothers and daughters. She performed the show in a shed, surrounded by relics of her past projects: ladders, trunks, chalkboards, even old Fringe venue tickets. Her piece A Place that Belongs to Monsters reimagines the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as a young girl playing with ponies, a teenager on a carousel, a woman at the bookies, and a pensioner barefoot in a field of wild horses. In From Dust, she uses overhead projectors to tell Gaelic folklore, and in The Wild Unfeeling World, Andrews’s take on Moby Dick, a woman chases the bottlenose whale that swam up the Thames in 2008.
Oh My Heart, Oh My Home comes to Studio Theatre from a lauded run at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe. Andrews’s fascination with space is at the heart of this piece: “I think we are transformed by the places we inhabit,” she writes. “These places begin to inhabit us.” In Oh My Heart, Oh My Home, she invites audiences to gather around a richly detailed dollhouse. Inside and around it, Andrews weaves a story of family, loneliness, and transformation. “The house is at the centre of the story,” she writes. “It comes to life as the tale unfolds.” In collaboration with George Jennings and Jack Brett, the piece is scored live.
Whether writing or designing, Andrews is first and foremost a storyteller. It’s a title that she both claims and interrogates: “I was trying to get to the bottom of why we care about stories,” she recalls about working on The Archive of Educated Hearts. The answer may come from her own family: Andrews’s grandmother can be heard in the piece, suggesting that the importance of stories comes not from the act of telling, but the act of listening. “Just be there and listen,” she advises Andrews, “That’s all. Can’t say any more than that, Case.”