Devoted and Disgruntled Roadshow - Bristol Reflections

The Bike Shed Theatre's Artistic Director, David Lockwood, offers his reflections on one of three South West stops on the D&D Roadshow.

We trundled up the motorway from Exeter’s Bike Shed Theatre and Kaleider at the end of June for the bright artistic lights of Bristol and the Tobacco Factory Theatre. This promised land is often talked about in Devon. What can we learn? How can we be more like it? Or should we be forging our own route?

Devoted and Disgruntled is an open space event for discussion by those who love theatre and wish it was better. For a city with a thriving theatrical scene, you’d assume Bristolians love theatre. Yet at the event on the last weekend of June, half of the forty-odd people attending came from outside the city. The reason? Bristol is sorted. Surely.

This seemed to be the consensus: Bristol is used to these sorts of discussions, a lot of artists are out making work (the event unfortunately coincided with the Up To Nature festival in Gloucestershire), there is a lot of devotion and not much disgruntlement. This is one interpretation.

But I think there is another.

Playwrights were a bit thin on the ground. It was wonderful to meet Martin Lytton from Cheltenham – a member of the industrious Everyman Writers’ Lab – and to see the ever-delightful Gill Kirk from Bath. We sat together in a conversation about political theatre, which touched on the ideas of whether it was acceptable to depress people when their budgets are already being squeezed. Saturday’s conversation was dominated with questions like this, darting around the issues, aiming to tackle timely subjects, such as artists not getting paid whilst others in the arts do. This is old news for the playwright, most of whom rarely get paid for their work. 

And then Sunday came round. A discussion about balancing permanence (buildings) and creativity (companies) drifted - via starlings - to the writer as collaborator and the initial devisor in a longer process. For Shakespeare, this goes back 400 years. For Martin Lytton and Gill Kirk, it may only be a few months. The age of the writer sat at their typewriter creating a masterpiece in which a comma may not be removed seems over. The argument put forward was that this period was a blip in a longer history of greater collaboration. 

I like this idea. I like having the writer in the room when I direct their plays. I like being able to ask them questions about their work. And I value their input in the realisation of the production. But Sunday’s conversation concerned me.

I worry that some writers feel excluded from the creation of theatre these days. There may appear to be a club in which theatre-makers get together and create things whilst writers send scripts to the Bristol Old Vic, Royal Court and Soho, receiving replies saying ‘thanks but...’. So the theatre-makers go to a Devoted and Disgruntled event, whilst the writers stay at home tweaking their covering letters.

Another conversation over the weekend: do titles matter? In recent years, theatre-makers in this country have had portfolio careers. The age of expecting an actor just to act, a director to direct, seems to be drawing to a close. And maybe we should expect writers to be more part of the process and less on the outside.

The risk, of course, is a confused mush, a jack-of-all-trades industry where the skilled writer is so busy making costumes and focusing the lights that they’re not fine-tuning the dialogue. But then, Shakespeare was also an actor and part-owner of his theatre.

One of the few rules of open space is ‘whoever comes are the right people’. I had two conversations in the evening of Saturday. One was with Annette Chown (actor, blogger, playwright) and one with Shaun McCarthy (playwright). One of them was at the open space, one wasn’t. One was devoted, one was disgruntled. You can’t change things if you’re not part of the conversation. Maybe the invitation needed to be more open. And, to get the best theatre, that invitation needs to be accepted.

As I trundle back down the motorway to Exeter, mentally exhausted from the discussions, physically exhausted from Shaun McCarthy’s hospitality, I’m left with this thought. In some ways, Bristol is sorted. In others, it is not. But it has set certain things in stone which are hard to break. Exeter isn’t sorted.

To borrow from Tony Blair (sorry): “The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.” What should we do differently in Exeter? And how can we include writers in this process?

Exeter is hosting an open space as part of Devoted & Disgruntled’s roadshow on the 1st and 2nd September. Writers are welcome.

Why Wait? Writer-Led Company Inkling Productions Reflect

Tom Hunt as Theo in LABYRINTH

The group of us (fourteen writers) who did the last two-year Creative Writing for Performance course at the University of Bristol (graduating 2010) wanted to continue to give each other support in our writing. We’ve been meeting once a month for almost another two years with two produced writing projects to our credit and a third in the wings. I could probably write a volume on what we’ve learned but will try to be brief.

We became Inkling Productions after our proposal was chosen for the Barnstaple Fringe Festival a year ago. We suddenly had a play to write AND produce. For Loose Tongues (2011), five writers wrote six monologues and I volunteered to direct, inter-cutting the monologues, with help from group members, for the final play.  This went on to Tisbury Festival and a run at the Hen and Chicken in Bristol and is being revived this year for Exeter Fringe and a short run at the Cornerhouse in Frome with the support of Nevertheless Productions. Meeting people and making connections was key to these things happening.

Our second play Labyrinth (2012) was created in response to a request from an Inkling member for a stimulating performance piece suitable for The Dean: a Gloucester centre for brain-damaged people. The script was loosely written and then devised by the actors and director. The show was sold-out at Bordeaux Quay for our public Bristol performance and was a hit at The Dean. It will also play at Exeter Fringe, but we’d like to take it to care homes, schools and other venues (see production woes). Our third play Twisted Yarns is in the revising stage.

We learned by sitting in on rehearsals that our writing wasn’t so precious. With actors and a director questioning the text we became more flexible at writing for actors. Also collaboration is a good experience, but some of us want to get back to writing as individuals. As a director I learned it’s easier to work with two to three writers rather than five. As a writer, collaboration is smoother if there are fewer of you writing.

Fundraising is the most serious requirement of this endeavour. As a not-for-profit group, we pay subs each year for start-up funds. We’ve given what we earned with our productions to actors (after some expenses). We’ve had brilliant actors and to keep them, they need to be paid. I had a terrific professional stage manager for Labyrinth who made directing so much easier. Luckily the Bristol area has great talent who are willing to do shows for next to nothing. But I feel very badly that we can’t pay them what they deserve for their creativity, time and energy.

We learned we’re not a production company. We don’t have enough people who have the time to devote to all the parts of production: fund raising, publicity, rehearsal venue search, accommodation and transport if the play tours, and directing. But if we concentrate on writing, where does the production come from? We need a production group who would like to use our writing.

Our original purpose was to meet to critique each other’s work-in-progress. In the last few months we’ve returned to that, but much of our meeting is still devoted to production business: where to find housing for actors in Exeter? Who’s doing the flyers? Has anyone heard back from the latest fund-raising application?

But we do have two successful plays out there; we’ve begun to build a name; we’ve learned to use social media; developed a website, Twitter and Facebook pages. For rehearsals - after dark, cold or cramped spaces, university rooms, the hold of a boat - we’ve found a wonderful pub landlord who loves theatre and only reserves the right to his room above the pub on Monday nights (and his name shall remain a secret).

Cornwall's cube theatre in Uganda

cube theatre have just got back from Uganda, where we have spent a couple of weeks working on theatre outreach projects, using our general drama skills and also using the puppets from our touring productions Pinocchio & Wooden Heart.

We were volunteering for The Molly & Paul Childcare Foundation, which offers homes and education for some of Uganda’s 3 million orphaned children (There are 15 million children in Uganda – 50% of the population).

The puppets were instrumental to most of our work, and were initially used as play tools to deliver health education workshops in some of the charity’s primary schools – e.g. exploring preventative measures against malaria and the importance of drinking safe, clean water and general personal hygiene.

The idea behind this was twofold:

firstly, to offer the children and teachers a way of learning, through imaginative play, that was different from their usual experience of 'chalk and talk' and rote learning;

secondly, to begin the process of enabling the children to express feelings and thoughts through the puppets that they may not do as easily, or they may do differently, with adults.

What amazed us was that the children had no concept of what a puppet was. So we spent a lot of time playing with them and showing them how to puppeteer and how to make puppets out of anything starting with their own hands.

What distressed us was that we saw one toy in the whole of our time there. What inspired us was the amount of joy that the children showed during this play. So we made some puppets out of local materials to leave there as well as the ones we had brought.

We also left an African boy puppet in the clinic there and taught the doctor to use him, so that poorly children could have a friend to chat to and to reassure them. The doctor can also use him to demonstrate things like injections to show how they don't hurt too much.

We delivered several performances of our show Pinocchio, for the children and also for the wider community. This had to be done minimally with no set or other props, and with occasional Lugandan translation, and so we found new ways of telling the story. We were capable of doing this, and it was also liberating in many ways, given that we had by that date, performed the show over 75 times in the UK. This has of course impacted on the show as it continues to tour – the main effect being to allow us to vary the rhythms and emphasis of the story and characters with a much closer ear to each particular audience.

We also worked with a secondary school to create a piece of theatre that was performed by the students, using the Greek myth of Prometheus as a starting point.

It was performed beautifully by 60 students, representing every year group in the school. We had expected for this physical style of storytelling to be quite familiar to the culture, given that much of their 'drama' as it was explained to us was mainly singing and dancing.

However, again our assumptions were challenged, finding that the main and minimal use of drama is in educational role play. They expressed a great deal of appreciation in again learning in a different way. The energy and skill with which they performed belied the three hours of rehearsal and their unfamiliarity with the style!

As we were only there for two weeks we had little time to go any deeper but we are continuing to develop the link with the Children's Village and the foundation.

We are developing a piece of immersive participatory theatre – working title Uganda 1.1 - using footage of the place and the children and interviews with the key adults in the community – to tour around UK schools. This will give students here a sense of the place and the people and will demand of them consideration of how best we can help communities like this. It will also enable further fundraising for both basic amenities and arts activity.

In a sense an anxiety we had and a question we have been asked on our return is “how useful or necessary is doing drama in a place that doesn't even have running clean water, electricity or basic teaching resources like exercise books?”

Our response, confirmed by our experiences and our discussions, is that it's not just about them staying alive. It's about them living, about a quality of life. It's about this community having the right, the resources, the skills and the capabilities to explore life through art just as we do. And if that helps pay for and build a new ground pump, so much the better. The trip was enabled in part by donations from our audience members and fan base, with the remainder being subsidised by the company. Puppets and equipment were also donated by individuals and also Mallets Home Hardware store, which were gifted to the charity when we left.

We can’t thank our generous audience members and sponsors enough. The work we did out there, enabled by those donations, has been far-reaching and more fulfilling than we could have hoped, on both sides. The whole team has been alternately inspired, humbled, delighted and moved by our all-too-brief visit, and by the community who so warmly welcomed us.