Video: SQUID: A VICTIM IMPACT STATEMENT Trailer Shared By Arcola Theatre
The show draws on decades of songs, scripts and films that unknowingly documented suppressed memories.
Arcola Theatre has posted a trailer for SQUID: A Victim Impact Statement, offering an early look at a production built from writer and filmmaker Johnny Daukes' own life story. The clip previews a work that the theatre describes as exploring how creative material can hold onto memories long before the person who made it understands what they mean.
The production centers on Daukes, who for more than thirty years wrote songs, scripts and films that kept circling the same unexplained themes. As described in the show's materials, long-suppressed memories eventually surfaced, revealing that his creative output had been unknowingly documenting a history of childhood abuse and the ways his mind had worked to protect itself from it. The show follows that process through to what the source material calls an exhausting conclusion at the Old Bailey earlier this year, framing the piece as an examination of how art and music can preserve what memory buries and help bring it back into the light.
SQUID: A Victim Impact Statement is set to run at Arcola Theatre from November 11 through 14, 2026, adding a deeply personal true story to the venue's autumn lineup alongside other new works recently announced there.
The trailer itself gives a brief visual introduction to Daukes' story, framing the production as one built around the question, in the source material's words, of what a life's work might reveal about secrets its creator didn't know he had.
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