Cardboard Adventures’ production of BOXVILLE is one of our four house touring shows this autumn.

Artistic Director Sam Wilde has been a Theatre and Puppetry designer/maker and cardboard enthusiast since 2012. He's been making things out of cardboard, first for his work and later for his kids, and HE LOVES IT!

We chat to Sam about the company and the show's tour which is heading to 13 house network venues across the South East.

Can you tell us a little bit about Cardboard Adventures and your family theatre work?

"Cardboard Adventures is a very new theatre company, BOXVILLE is our first show, but it’s been a LONG time in the making! I have been working in theatre for nearly 20 years now, making a variety of work for a diverse range of audiences."

"Cardboard Adventures came about during the pandemic. I was fortunate in the first lockdown to make a show of Jon Klassen's masterpiece I Want My Hat Back with Director Ian Nicholson, hosted by Little Angel Theatre. The show was released on YouTube and became a real springboard for my career as well as a personal signpost for the kind of work I wanted to make in the future. The whole thing was made from cardboard."

"I Want My Hat Back really did two things, it drew in a massive audience and was created in a very accessible, clever way. We even received fan mail and found that people started making shows inspired by the work or in a similar style. I loved that! Making a performance feel accessible is something that I've consciously fed into my work as a designer and is very much at the core of Cardboard Adventures' work and BOXVILLE as a show. I want our audiences to leave feeling like they could do it themselves!"

"BOXVILLE is a cornerstone of our interactive work. As an audience member you get to make things during the show, but we don’t want the fun to end when the show does, so we offer downloadable patterns on the Cardboard Adventures website - these show you how to make things from BOXVILLE, like the crab claws or the dragon’s head. Everything’s made from waste cardboard and the patterns give you a step-by-step guide to easily follow at home."

BOXVILE is a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) based show for young audiences – why was this important for you as a company?

"We made BOXVILLE for people like me when I was younger. Like a lot of young people, I really struggled with Science, Technology Engineering and Maths at school. I felt like I couldn’t do them in any way shape or form, and so I wasn’t even going to try. Now I don’t just do STEM subjects as part of my work, but I LOVE them. This is something we've really tried to bring to the fore in BOXVILLE, making the exploration and enjoyment of these skills something that’s off the textbook page; a hands-on, creative and accessible experience that everyone can achieve in."

"Whilst inspired by STEM, BOXVILLE isn’t a STEM show in the traditional sense – it’s not heavy-handed with its messaging. I like to think of it as creativity for people who feel like they can’t draw; engineering for people who feel like they can't do maths and science for those who don’t know the name of any of the elements. The show is empowering, before you have a chance to think about whether you can do something, you've already started building it."

"There is nothing more rewarding than the looks on the faces of the younger members of the audience when they leave with their cardboard creations. They've solved problems, experimented with techniques, built and created; they leave as artists, engineers, scientists, makers and craftspeople all at once."

The show has some super fun interactive, and hands-on challenges for children and families – from dancing with corrugated crabs to meeting cardboard dragons. Can you tell us a bit more?

"I always say that it’s unlikely BOXVILLE is similar to a family theatre show you've seen before. Whilst it is definitely a theatre show, and one on which we've worked very hard on to make sure the production standards are second to none; it is much more like an adventure or a game that we all play together, a workshop with a brilliant story."

"The show is about an hour long, with half of the time spent building things to entertain dancing crabs, or to trick robot Alexa, or make something to help you sneak past a very rare corrugated brown back dragon! It’s a very interactive, hands-on, craft-a long experience filled with cardboard sets and costumes and puppets!"

What are you most looking forward to about touring BOXVILLE! this autumn?

"Oh, tricky one! I guess what I'm looking forward to most is our audiences. I have two young daughters who have seen a LOT of my shows, including BOXVILLE in every step of its development. It is the one show that they want to play, often on a weekend we get "Daddy, can we play BOXVILLE?" For me that’s what the show is about! It’s about parents spending time sitting with their children, big brothers sitting with little sisters, grandparents with grandchildren, uncles with nieces, friends with friends – it’s about people getting together in all their wonderful shapes, forms and relationships, and playing games, having fun and seeing what they can build together from waste, recyclable materials."

And lastly, what has been your favourite thing to make out of cardboard?

"Another tough one. I've been lucky enough to build a bit of a career out of playing with cardboard. I've made puppets for Shakespeare’s Globe, I've created window displays for Fortnam & Mason, I even won Kirstie’s Handmade Christmas with my Cardboard Sleigh in 2022!"

"That’s the great thing about making from cardboard. We say in BOXVILLE that creativity is not about thinking outside the box, or even inside the box. It’s about cutting the box up and turning it into something completely different."

"If pushed to pick my favourite, I think it might be an advent calendar creation that I made for my kids when I went away to work for a month, we called it a DADvent calendar. Hmm, or maybe ROBOX from BOXVILLE, or the Dragon is pretty good too…"