Who is Madame Midnight? Our AD blogs about starting to make our new show.

Picture this: a dark wood at night, a glint of light through the trees. Taking a winding path towards the glow, you come upon an abandoned fortune-telling machine (like the one in Big). Inside, an animatronic female fortune teller, in robes of midnight blue, sits inert, eyes closed. But if you put a coin in the slot, her eyes open. She’ll stare in to your soul and scribble your future on a little card. But first, you’ll have to go on a treasure hunt to find her...

Can anyone really predict the future? As AD of Fireraisers, and writer of Amazing Madame Midnight, I’ve been interviewing people whose job it is to do just that.

• The Ecologist
• The Astrologer
• The Shaman
• The Economist
• The Death Doula
• The Psychologist
• The Meteorologist
• The TV Weather Forecaster
• The Religious Studies teacher
• The Sceptic
• The Tarot Reader
• The Geologist
• The Druid

These figures, real and fascinating people as they are, immediately seem like archetypes: the characters in a tarot pack, perhaps, or in a folk tale. Might it be exciting to meet an astrologer under a starry sky? A weather forecaster on a windy promontory? A druid in an ancient ruin? Perhaps they can help us find Madame Midnight?

The common thread in my interviewees was that they all said we needed to treat our environment better: that the Climate Crisis was the biggest future challenge faced by each and every one of us, in all walks of life. So this steers me towards thinking that maybe Madame Midnight is a kind of Gaia figure, guardian of the earth and a warning to change our ways before it’s too late? Midnight is always a deadline: for Cinderella at her ball, for the end of one year and the start of another - to save the world.

Or perhaps she’s a charlatan, a woman who knows that by donning a fortune teller’s outfit and acting a bit mysterious, she can hoodwink people in to believing a fantasy?

Perhaps she’s just an ordinary woman, facing a crisis in her life and craving to escape the rat race and live off-grid in an isolated yurt in the woods?

Of course, she doesn’t exist at all yet – and this is where our community, both locally in Lewes and also on the internet, comes in. Through our online experience in November, facilitated by Chris Rolls of 64 Million Artists, we worked with participants from across the UK to start to find her. For info on upcoming online and in person events, sign up to our mailing list HERE

Polly Wiseman