SQUID: A Victim Impact Statement

What if your life’s work revealed secrets you didn’t even know you had…

For more than thirty years, writer and filmmaker Johnny Daukes unknowingly documented a story he could neither remember nor understand. Songs, scripts and films kept returning to the same themes, each becoming another fragment of an unwitting documentary, pointing towards a truth buried deep beneath memory.

As long-suppressed events began to surface, those creative works took on an extraordinary new significance, revealing not only Johnny’s history of childhood abuse, but the mysterious ways in which his mind had protected itself.

Following an exhausting process that came to a conclusion at the Old Bailey earlier this year, SQUID explores how art and music can preserve what memory has buried — and ultimately help bring it back into the light.

Blending live music, humour and storytelling, SQUID: A Victim Impact Statement is a true story about memory, creativity and an accidental search for catharsis.

Post-show talk
12 November: Following the performance, writer and broadcaster Peter Curran (Bunk Bed and No Blacks No Irish on BBC Radio 4) will host a brief Q&A with Johnny Daukes, exploring some of the themes raised by SQUID – memory, abuse, creativity and the strange ways in which art can reveal things before we’re ready to understand them.