My first performance was at a Chats Palace Pick & Mix live art cabaret in 2001, and since then I’ve created more than 20 different solo performances of varying length, winning multiple awards and grants, as well as devising and performing shows with other companies that regularly tour around the world. Shows I’ve created have won the Herald Angel, Live Theatre New Writing and Empty Space Bursary Awards.
“This show is a Delight. A bonkers delight.” - London Pub Theatres Magazine
Where are the suburbs of our consciousness? What are the suburbs of ourselves? Oh! Suburbia! is an idiosyncratic and beguiling show about life growing up in the suburban American Midwest*.
“Unique & Imaginative” - Northwest End
When I was a boy, the world turned upside down. My buttoned-up anti-social plumber father - in an uncharacteristic impulse of recklessness - joined the Palos Village Players amateur dramatics company, just as they were workshopping the 1970s phenomenon, Oh! Calcutta! According to Wikipedia: ‘The 1970s phenomenon, Oh! Calcutta! was an avant-garde theatrical revue filled with sketches on sex-related topics and featuring extended scenes of total nudity, both male and female.’ I was nine years old. My parents called me Bobby Junior.** Sheltered suburban life was never the same again…
“A triumph” - Reviewshub
Oh! Suburbia! presents funny, intriguing, surprising tales of life in our residential outlying districts in the form of an avant-garde theatrical revue, a one-man avant-garde theatrical review: mixing film, songs, experimental dance*** and live musical stories about unjust childhood punishments, playground heroism, meticulously planned escapes, tragedy and comedy, life and death and everything in between. You’ll love it. Come and see.
Finalist in the category of Best Solo Show at the 2022 Standing Ovation Awards.
*In Palos Heights, a southwest suburb of Chicago. **My father is also called Bob. ***I am not an elegant dancer.
Normal can be extraordinary. If you look in detail at an everyday life you can find art. There is beauty and inspiration right under the couch…
That's Me on the Left, in the Parka is a warm, funny, moving show about self-consciousness and the nature of love that makes audience members think, feel and leave delighted. It presents real lives of ordinary people - family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues - set to music, with slides & film, humor & compassion. Stories of childhood piano lessons, multi-generational break-ups, tales of revenge & comeuppance, emotional refrigerators and much more.
The set is a self-built upright piano that acts as a visual metaphor - through the show it comes to life. The piano is played, projected on, and crawled inside. It moves on its own, trap doors open, instruments pop out, the back lifts off, drawers pull out and walls swivel, until everything - inside and out - is opened wide.
That’s Me on the Left, in the Parka is available to tour.
In the late 19th century the Wisconsin frontier town of Black River Falls descended into a period of madness, murder and suicide. In the late 20th century, my sister Jenny settled nearby, married the same Albanian man three times and converted to Islam.
When Jenny first married Safet I thought, ‘Fine! That’s great! I’m open-minded! A Muslim in the family!’ But it wasn’t as easy as that - families rarely are. Jenny & I used to pretend we were twins. What happens now? Is she the same person scarfed as she was in shorts? And why move to northern Wisconsin?
The show talks about how life can change. How it can fall apart and come back together again. It talks about communities, congregations and families, about tolerance, life and how everything can eventually be OK.
Black River Falls received the Empty Space/Live Theatre New Writing Bursary in 2012, and was featured as part of the Yard Theatre Generation Game collection of new work in 2013.
Black River Falls: a conversation with live music, film, and stories of about a Christian/Agnostic daughter of the Western world who decides to embrace Islam, embark on an intercultural relationship, and settle in a small, Midwestern town rich with its own strange history. Survival, love, madness and history, songs and occasional puppets, and all the drama, dismay, surprise and humour of life.
Big In Japan is about the nature of friendship changing over time and includes stories of life in Gifu Prefecture (where I lived for four years) and people called 'Steve'. My second full-length solo show, it widened my experimentaiton with the use of media: sampled sounds, voiceovers and film, and naïve folk dance.
I went along to my 20th high school reunion and brought a video camera. What happens to friendship over time? How does it change? How does it stay the same? And why do I know so many people who are called Steve?
The show debuted at the Hackney Empire, had a long run at Oval House Theatre, and was staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where it won a Herald Angel Award.
“Like Tom Waits soundtracking ‘The Waltons’. Karper is part performance artist, part cabaret, complete with audience participation concerning the nature of true love. Warmth, generosity, and good old-fashioned honesty ripple through this show. “
★★★★
- Neil Cooper, Glasgow Herald