‘It’s constantly surprising’ – behind REPLAY: A Limitless Recycled Playground

It’s a tricky question, but one solution comes in the form of REPLAY: A Limitless Recycled Playground, which has returned to the Spirit Level space in our Royal Festival Hall, having previously been enjoyed by a huge amount of visitors as part of our 2023 Planet Summer and again during summer 2025.

For those who may’ve missed it the first two times around, this child and grown up friendly environment is part art installation and part adventure playground, and is constructed purely from waste and recycled materials. REPLAY invites you to free your imagination and build your own worlds and invent your own games that may fuel further creativity for those who follow you into the space.

To get a greater idea of what REPLAY involves, what it aims to do and how it came to be, we caught up with one of its creators, Herd Theatre’s Sam Caseley, to talk more about this Southbank Centre commission.

​​Let’s start with a bit of background, can you tell us about the team behind REPLAY?

We’re The Herd, and we make theatre and experiences for children and families. We’re based in Hull in East Yorkshire, and we make work that has been hosted all around the UK. REPLAY is a collaboration between Herd artists, Ruby Thompson, Rūta Irbīte and myself, Sam Caseley. Ruby’s a director, Rūta is a designer, and I’m a writer and composer. Ruby and I run The Herd, and Rūta is one of our frequent collaborators.

How would you describe REPLAY?

REPLAY is a play experience – an hour of play for children and grown ups – built entirely out of waste materials. It’s kind of an installation, kind of an adventure playground; a space where you can move things, make things, dress up in things, touch things, combine things. It’s kind of endless.

What inspired REPLAY? And how did you arrive at this final form of an installation and experience?

Our bread and butter is theatre, but we’ve always been interested in how audiences can engage in our work beyond sitting down and watching. This runs alongside a fascination with ‘play’ and creating spaces where proper free, creative play can happen. REPLAY is a culmination of all that. It is a bit like a show in that there’s a beginning, middle and end, an audience that share time and space together. We think there’s real magic in that. But then it’s also just like an extra special, well-designed playground, where you can do what you want, however you want.

REPLAY is taking over our Level 1 Exhibition Space here at the Southbank Centre; how much did the nature of this space determine the form that REPLAY took?

We’ve been super responsive to the space. It’s a very long room, with some natural divisions, and we’ve designed the experience around that. We won’t give too much away but there’s something about the length of the space that means you can only truly discover it by going further and further in. Like a forest. Or a tunnel.

Some of our audience may remember you from Play Unlimited, which you brought to our Imagine festival in 2023. What’s the relationship between that work and REPLAY?

Play Unlimited was a research project that fed into REPLAY. REPLAY is built entirely out of waste materials and this was something we tested at Imagine. We put a load of waste objects in a room – rope, fabric, old blocks from theatre shows, wooden offcuts – and invited audiences to play; to build, to dress up, to create structures, to imagine, and they did exactly that! With REPLAY we’ve heightened that experience. Everything is still reclaimed waste, but we’ve worked hard to make every item look interesting, have some playable or sensory quality, and make sure the installation as a whole is exciting to look at and be in.

Individual and personal interaction and reaction is a big part of each of these works, did any of the interactions with Play Unlimited take you by surprise?

Every single audience brings something different. One session will be filled with the most incredibly designed structures. The next session all the adults in the room will be dressed as wizards. The next everything is everywhere, in a beautiful, chaotic mess. We think we’ve seen all that the space can do, and then a group of children will do something else. It’s constantly surprising.

What do you hope young people will get from interacting with REPLAY?

Ultimately we want to give children and grown ups a moment in their day to play together. To be present with each other and explore the world together through touch, physical play and imagination. The world is full of things pulling us in a million directions, and we hope REPLAY is an antidote to that. There’s also a message in there of reusing and of looking after your world. We’re keen not to burden young children with a Climate Emergency they had no part in creating, but we hope REPLAY demonstrates the joy and creativity that can come out of having to think sustainably.