New Writing

Edinburgh Fringe Report 2015 Part 2: The Final Reckoning

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1143114837LOGO_ORANGE[1]The Edinburgh Fringe is over for another year, but how did our intrepid amateur companies get on performing plays licensed by Nick Hern Books? We hear from three of them as they recount the highs – and the lows – of mounting a production on the Fringe. (If you missed the first instalment, it’s available here).

pp posterPassing Places by Stephen Greenhorn
Great Child Productions

The fringe is an experience like no other.

3,314 shows competing for an audience over the 313 venues. It is a challenge to sell a show, regardless of whether you have a ‘name’ or a recognisable brand. So the process of promoting the show throughout the day to the throngs of potential audience members is tough.

With a show like Passing Places there is no issue with staying motivated. Our team came up with some fantastic ways to promote the show, including going out in character onto the famous Royal Mile to help tourists cross the busy road.

Passing Places cast members Andrew Dart, Ciaran Drysder and Brodie Cummins on the Royal Mile

Passing Places cast members Andrew Dart, Ciaran Drysder and Brodie Cummins on the Royal Mile

The show got respectable audiences each night of our six-night run and a decent 3★ review from the Edinburgh Guide.

We were lucky enough to be warmly welcomed by our wonderful venue, Greenside @ Nicolson Square. The venue’s staff and techs were monumental in helping us deliver every element of our production, particularly the Citroën Saxo which sat on stage throughout the performance. With a 10-minute get-in before each show, and a 20-minute get-out afterwards, it was no mean feat to assemble a car and full set within our slot. Staying to time was key, so it was crucial that everyone played their part to the full.

Director Tom Sergeant and castLiving together for a week, promoting a show and putting it on is an intense and draining experience, but I wouldn’t change anything about it at all. I’d fully recommend it to any theatre group thinking about broadening their horizons and exploring new audiences.

– Tom Sergeant, CEO of Great Child Productions

ff-posterprintresFoxfinder by Dawn King
Master of None

When performing at the Edinburgh Fringe, August can seem like both the longest and shortest month of the year. It’s weird. After the amount of planning that goes into a show (our own preparations for #EdFringe2015 began in 2014), it sometimes feels like you’ll never stop working on it.

However, 1st September sneaks up very quickly; it always seems premature (no matter how exhausted you or your company may be). This was certainly true this year. Despite having spent over a month rehearsing and performing in Scotland’s capital, we felt that we were interrupted mid-stride by the Fringe ending.

Promoting Foxfinder on the Royal Mile

Promoting Foxfinder on the Royal Mile

We’d had a hell of a month, though. Highs included receiving five-star reviews, climbing Arthur’s Seat, and our end-of-run party; lows involved some prop-based mishaps (our dead rabbits went missing in a smoking area one grizzly Wednesday evening), and being told to get a job while pitching the show on the Royal Mile. On a Tuesday morning. At 11am. By a man who wasn’t working either. And anyway, we were working extremely hard!

Foxfinder, with a running time of 90 minutes, is a big beast to perform, and we were competing with over 3,300 other shows for an audience.

Phil Jupitus lends a hand

Phil Jupitus lends a hand

In terms of generating audiences, though, we were fortunate to be working with an award-winning script already known to many; we had a strong base on which to build our production. We’re in no doubt that Foxfinder’s reputation was a great starting point for our marketing campaign, and contributed incalculably to the success of the production – as one reviewer stated, ‘The power of Dawn King’s script has already been recognised’. Putting our own stamp on it was another matter, but I think that,  ultimately, we succeeded.

The same reviewer went on, ‘theatre company Master of None add an exceptionally strong performance, and a haunting visual style. 5★’

– Hugo Nicholson, producer & cast member

Foxfinder Banner

PentagonForever House by Glenn Waldron
Pentagon Theatre

Well, we are all done!

Twelve amazing performances later and we have to say goodbye to this wonderful city and an awesome festival! Both cast and crew have really enjoyed bringing Forever House to life, and the feedback we received, both in person and on social media, was fantastic! All the hours of rehearsals, the workshops, trips and expenses have been more than worth it. And a massive thank you to ‘Phil’ – whoever you are – for our first 5-star audience review!

Transporting the set for Forever House through Edinburgh

Transporting the set for Forever House through Edinburgh

A demanding show like this was bound to have the odd hiccup or two. Our particular favourite is probably having to carry our red sofa along the Royal Mile and across town to complete our get-in on time! It’s fair to say it attracted a few odd glances!

Furniture seemed to be a recurring issue throughout the process: the production team had to stop itself laughing when our cupboard decided to fall apart during one of the performances! So huge thanks must go to our production team – I honestly don’t know what we would have done without Roisin and Claire. Staying up until 3am every night, sticking reviews to flyers, cleaning the apartment, fixing cupboard doors… there was an endless list of jobs, and our team always had it covered.

Cast and crew with author Glenn Waldron

Cast and crew with author Glenn Waldron (centre)

Forever House is such a clever play, both in that it maintains a simple structure, and yet says a lot about what identity means to people and the importance of ‘belonging’. All the actors worked incredibly hard to bring something fresh and new to each performance, always coming to myself or Freddie (my co-director) to ask how they could improve or what they could work on individually. The beauty of this play is that the awkwardness of its characters comes across so naturally, and a lot of our audience feedback reflected how much work had been put in by all of our cast.

The playwright, Glenn Waldron, who was incredibly helpful throughout the process, was kind enough to come and see our final performance in Edinburgh. It was lovely to hear how much he enjoyed our interpretation of his play, and he took the time to congratulate everyone involved. Forever House is a play we remain very attached to, and we will be keeping our eyes peeled for Glenn’s upcoming work. Working with Pentagon Theatre has been an absolute joy, and it has been a pleasure to direct this little gem of a piece.

– James Bowen, co-director

You might also be interested in…

indexUncaused Effects: Playwrights on playwriting. In this podcast sponsored by Nick Hern Books, Exeunt Magazine talks to nine playwrights at various stages of their career and at different points of the writing process.

The writers discuss all aspects of playwriting, from the first moment of inspiration to the inevitable struggles with the blank page and, finally, to the moment it all takes shape on the stage. Presenter Tim Bano asks what it means to be a writer, and discusses the state of new writing in the UK.

The podcast features interviews with: Tom Basden, David Edgar, Tim Foley, Catriona Kerridge, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Dan Rebellato, Stef Smith, Jack Thorne and Steve Waters.

And don’t miss out on this special offer on books by some of the playwrights featured in the episode.

Girls centre stage: Lucy Kerbel on building a new canon of writing for young actors

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Good roles for young female actors are in short supply, so Tonic Theatre set out to change that by commissioning a series of new plays with mainly or entirely female casts for schools and youth theatre groups to perform. As the first three plays in the Platform series are published by Nick Hern Books and made available for performance, Tonic’s Lucy Kerbel explains why things have to change, and how you can get involved…

Commissioning and publishing a range of new plays for young actors which put girls and their stories centre stage is something I have wanted to do for a long time and, since Tonic Theatre was formed in 2011, it is an idea I have been looking to get off the ground. Tonic exists to support UK theatre to achieve greater gender equality in its workforces and its repertoires; essentially our mission is to catalyse a culture-shift in how theatre thinks and works, so that talented women are given the same levels of support and opportunity as talented men.

While it has pretty big aspirations, Tonic is a tiny organisation; we have one-and-a-bit members of staff, no core funding, and a very modest financial turnover. Because we have such limited funds and capacity, we have to use these wisely and consequently are extremely strategic about where we target our efforts. I spend much time looking to identify ‘pressure points’ – places where, with a bit of work, a far bigger ripple effect can be achieved. For this reason, much of our work to date has been focused on partnerships with some of the largest organisations in the country, because if they change, others will follow. But youth drama has always been clear to me as one of the greatest pressure points of all. It is the engine room of the theatre industry; tomorrow’s theatre-makers (not to mention audience members) are to be found today in youth-theatre groups, university drama societies and school drama clubs all over the country.

The Light Burns Blue by Silva Semerciyan

The Light Burns Blue by Silva Semerciyan

If we can challenge their assumptions about the role of women’s stories, voices, and ideas in drama, then change in the profession – in time – will be immeasurably easier to achieve.

Beyond this strategic interest in youth drama, I was convinced that girls were getting a raw deal and I found that troubling. Having worked previously as a youth-theatre director, I was familiar with the regular challenge of trying to find scripts that had adequate numbers of female roles for all the committed and talented girls that wanted to take part. In nearly all the various youth-drama groups I worked in across a five-year period, there were significantly more girls than boys. However, when it came to finding big-cast, age-appropriate plays for them to work on, I was constantly frustrated by how few there seemed to be that provided enough opportunity for the girls, its most loyal and committed participants. When looking at contemporary new writing for young actors to perform, one could be mistaken for thinking that youth drama was a predominantly male pursuit, rather than the other way round.

Second Person Narrative by Jemma Kennedy

Second Person Narrative by Jemma Kennedy

Aside from the practicalities of matching the number of roles to the number of girls in any one drama group, the nature of writing for female characters was something I struggled to get excited about. While there were some notable examples, often the writing for female characters seemed somewhat lacklustre. They tended to be characters at the periphery of the action rather than its heart, with far less to say and do than their male counterparts, and with a tendency towards being one‑dimensional, rather than complex or vibrant, funny or surprising. Why was it that in the twenty-first century the quality as well as the quantity of roles being written for girls still seemed to lag behind those for boys so demonstrably?

Keen to check I wasn’t just imagining this imbalance, Tonic conducted a nationwide research study looking into opportunities for girls in youth drama, focusing on the quantity and quality of roles available to them. The research was written up into a report, Swimming in the shallow end, and is published on the Tonic Theatre website. Not only did the research confirm my worst fears – more depressingly, it exceeded them. While many of the research participants were vocal about the social, artistic and emotional benefits that participation in youth-drama productions can have on a young person’s life, so too were they – to quote the report – on ‘the erosion to self-esteem, confidence and aspiration when these opportunities are repeatedly held out of reach… [and] for too many girls, this is the case’.

But despite the doom and gloom of the research findings, there remained an exciting proposition; to write stories that weren’t currently being put on stage, and to foreground – rather than ignore – the experiences, achievements and world-view of young women, perhaps the group above all others in British society whose situation has altered so dramatically and excitingly over the past hundred or so years. Tonic commissioned writers I was most fascinated to see respond to the brief set to them: a large-cast play written specifically for performance by young actors, with mainly or entirely female casts and in which the female characters should be no less complex or challenging than the male characters. I asked them to write in such a way that these plays could be performed by young people anywhere in the country, and that there should be scope for every school, college and youth-theatre group performing the play to make a production their own.

This Changes Everything by Joel Horwood

This Changes Everything by Joel Horwood

At Tonic our hope is that the first Platform plays – The Light Burns Blue by Silva Semerciyan, Second Person Narrative by Jemma Kennedy and This Changes Everything by Joel Horwood – will be just the beginning of a longer trajectory of work for us. Although it entails further fundraising mountains to climb, we plan to commission and publish more plays over future years. Our aspiration is that over time Platform will become a new canon of writing for young actors and one that puts girls and their lives centre stage. I dearly hope that they will be taken up by groups all over the country and performed for many years to come.

‘Drama is an important tool for building confidence and empowering young people. Platform will give girls opportunity to access these benefits as much as their male counterparts.’ – Moira Buffini

A few words from NHB’s Performing Rights Manager, Tamara von Werthern…

Tamara von Werthern

“We’re incredibly proud and excited to be supporting Tonic Theatre’s important work in addressing gender inequality in the theatre. I’m sure these plays will be picked up and performed by youth theatres, schools and drama clubs across the country, as they really do address an urgent need for more good parts for young women. I’ve been asked so many times to recommend plays that offer young women strong roles, and it’s wonderful that now we can start licensing three new plays that fit the bill exactly. I urge everyone who works with youth theatre or teaches drama at a school to pick up these plays and give them a go!”

All three Platform plays – The Light Burns Blue by Silva Semerciyan, Second Person Narrative by Jemma Kennedy and This Changes Everything by Joel Horwood – are published on 11 June 2015 by Nick Hern Books.

Buying from an educational institution or youth group? You can get all three Platform plays at a special discount price – head to the Platform website for more information.

The plays are all available immediately for amateur performance. To apply for performing rights, visit the Nick Hern Books Plays to Perform website or contact our Performing Rights Department.

For more information about Tonic Theatre, visit www.tonictheatre.co.uk.

Lucy Kerbel photograph by Slav Kirichok

Sandi Toksvig: Why I Wrote Bully Boy

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As her play, Bully Boy, opens at the all-new St. James Theatre in London, Sandi Toksvig explains how her own sense of rage led her to write about the impact of a contemporary military occupation on the mental health of serving soldiers…

For someone who thinks of themselves as a pacifist I have written a lot about war lately. Perhaps it is not so surprising. We are all subjected to images of conflict every day as one faction or another shoots it out in Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan or Sudan or any number of other distant places which come home to us through the television. At first my interest was mostly academic. I was working on my new novel, Valentine Grey. It concerns a young Victorian woman who, in 1899, decides to escape the confines of the drawing room by disguising herself as a man and going to serve in the second Anglo-Boer War. The war is interesting on many fronts, not least the fact that it was one of the first where the average soldier was literate. As a consequence, there are many contemporary diaries and I found I was able to march with the men as they battled across the veld. The stories were personal as some began to question what they were doing so many miles from home. As I studied the conflict, I realised that the war was not about morals or freedom but about money and influence, and it made me think how little has changed.

Photograph by Mike Eddowes

The Honourable Artillery Company in London provided many Boer War volunteers and my research there led to my being invited to a regimental dinner. As I sat chatting with soldiers serving today, my thinking turned from whole regiments in battle to individuals. Meanwhile, my partner, a psychotherapist, was dealing with a number of returned veterans in a private mental-health facility. She was enraged by their treatment and came home each day in a state of distress.

I began to read about the effect of war on the individual. In particular, Dave Grossman’s book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, which had a huge effect on me. Some of the facts were astonishing. In Vietnam, it took an average of 50,000 rounds of ammunition to kill one enemy soldier. The truth is if the Americans had really wanted to be efficient on the battlefield, they would have been better off with bows and arrows. The US troops, it seems, were reluctant to kill anyone, and when they returned home anywhere between 400,000 and 1.5 million veterans of that war suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. I read about every war’s legacy amongst combatants of all nations – divorce, marital problems, tranquiliser use, alcoholism, joblessness, heart disease, high blood pressure, ulcers and of course, tragically, suicide.

Photograph by Mike Eddowes

I was already appalled by the Bush/Cheney strategy of ‘All-them-ragheads-look-alike-to-me’ which conflated 9/11 and Iraq; of the average member of the public’s inability to distinguish between Afghanistan and Iraq, and my rage grew. I thought about the young men I had met who had been sent to do an incomprehensibly difficult job by their nation and who, in many instances, had not been cared for properly when they returned home, broken inside. I wondered where the movies might be which celebrate the returning veteran and yet explain his vulnerable emotional state? I had so many questions. How is it possible that one in ten prisoners in England and Wales once served in the armed forces? What has gone wrong that half of all GPs are unaware of official guidelines on how to diagnose mental-health trauma because of battle scars from the front line?

When Patrick Sandford, artistic director of the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton, said he wanted to commission a play from me it was as if Bully Boy poured out of my head. Part of the problem with an issue as complex and distressing as soldiers’ mental health is getting people to engage with it. I have always believed that the theatre is a wonderful forum for confronting difficult subjects. ‘Theatre’ comes from the Greek word ‘theatron’ meaning ‘place for seeing’. It is a communal place where we come together for an exchange of ideas; where we can explore experiences which may have nothing to do with our daily lives but which touch our humanity.

There is much more to say than can be covered in a single play. In the end, I focused on a tale of just two men, but I am not unaware of the stories that remain untold. The truth is most Iraqi children now suffer from psychological symptoms. According to a study of 10,000 primary-school students in the Shaab section of North Baghdad, seventy per cent of children are suffering from trauma-related issues.

Bully Boy (£9.99)

I remain full of rage on behalf of the young men who have been sent to do older men’s political bidding. I am appalled that George Bush and Tony Blair colluded in misinformation to the public. Bush quit drinking – it would have been better if he had quit lying. Meanwhile, Tony Blair ended up fantastically rich and, irony of ironies, a peace envoy.

I am thrilled to have penned this piece for Southampton, and that it has gone on to a new life in Northampton and become the opening production at the new St. James Theatre in London. North, south, I need people to pay attention – not to me but to the men whose voices deserve to be heard.

NHB are very excited to be publishing Sandi Toksvig’s play Bully Boy. To order your copy with 20% off click here – no voucher code required.

Bully Boy is currently playing at the brand new St James Theatre as the opening play in their first ever season. Click here to buy your tickets.

Tamara von Werthern

Here’s a few words from NHB’s Performing Rights Manager, Tamara von Werthern…

“This is a great play for two strong male performers, one in his forties to mid-fifties, and one in his early twenties, who will both be on stage throughout the piece. It’s a moving story about the damage war does to anyone who participates in it, in whatever capacity, and deserves to be seen widely, so please pick it up and put it on, if you can!”

LAGAN: Writing Northern Ireland – by Stacey Gregg

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Lagan

Lagan by Stacey Gregg (£9.99)

Stacey Gregg is a Belfast-born playwright whose new play – Lagan – marks her UK debut, premiering tonight at Ovalhouse, South London. A kaleidoscope of stories from post-Troubles Belfast, Lagan is an intimate and absorbing portrait of a city with a past like no other. Stacey reveals her desire to ‘write’ her hometown…

Lagan sprang from a desire to record stories of moments from the lives of characters definitively of Northern Ireland, today. Sounds simple. But Northern Ireland finds itself in a stage of transition, letting go of its recent troubled past, wondering what it is, and what it might be. In many ways, this is gloriously banal: it is worrying about water tax and recycling, like any other country with the luxury to do so. It marks a settling-down, an opportunity to reflect and, for some, even a kind of anti-climax. Young men in particular, from both traditions, are left with a sense of uncertainty about what defines them. How does that overused word, ‘identity’, apply now we are post-conflict? Like any event that has lain long and deep in a people’s psyche, it is more complex than this. But across industries and disciplines, many seek to explore or project what the Northern Irish make of themselves now, in what is wryly referred to as Nu-Belfast.

In the late 1990s there was disbelief as the Troubles came to a close. It had dragged on so long Lagan no one thought it possible to see Ian Paisley Snr sitting next to Martin McGuinness, laughing together – laughing! But here we were. Suddenly, previously strangled aspects of the region started to sprout tourism, delis, coffee shops, IKEA. The city has evolved over the past decade, no doubt about it, and the middle class, long muted and diffuse, is now restored. But quickly that familiar, capitalist, intoxicated meta-narrative became the only song Belfast sang: Look! Swishy bars! Posh shops! Bring your business here! The north was alarmed by the collapse of the Irish economy in the south, however shrill ads selling the quaint and the cool (the twee and the twee) doggedly multiply, whilst a substantial swathe of society, specifically the urban poor, continue living at a standard much as before. Attempting to write about Northern Ireland, and in particular my hometown, Belfast, felt increasingly like writing a tale of Two Cities. And rue that you be the killjoy in the corner, going on about the disempowered, community projects, remembering the past…

Lagan production shotsIn order not to get lost in illustrating points or statistics, it is always the truisms to which we return: the personal is political. Simple stories allow the blanks to speak. Meanwhile, from theatre to TV, the elusive commissioning steer seemed to be ‘We’re sick of the Troubles! We’re sick of dour, political, hearth and home, laced with that uneasy pressure to put a balaclava on it.’ There is a fatigue of Northern Ireland as we had got used to seeing it, and simultaneously a curiosity for some kind of retrospective analysis, in order, maybe, to move on. There is possibly also a slightly colonial desire to smooth over that unpleasant chapter and race on to funner, brighter, sexier! etc. An expedient aversion to political engagement, it might get in the way of the merchandise! And yet what of those stock images of youths still kicking off in front of riot police every year? Kids to whom sectarian slurs are as ingrained as their parents generation? To those who are asking, it would seem that class inequality generally is on the rise. But Northern Ireland’s working and/or underclass no longer has the limelight, a platform, a voice.

So, following a peculiar hiatus, it feels as though there is a revived interest in the state of the region and its residual questions, the type of analysis only really possible with a bit of reflection and hindsight. All this said, the texture and conflicts within Lagan are not particular to, but perhaps more present or pressing in the North of Ireland. Its specificity is its universality. Back to water tax and recycling. The devil is in the detail. Retail development, social planning, teen pregnancy… – but amplified by the fact that Northern Ireland is the only country in the UK where abortion is not facilitated; where, as of 2008, there is less than 5.5% integrated schooling; where fundamental Christianity is on the rise in the young; and where many still live with the echoes of something that makes precious more sense now than it did then…

Lagan production shotsLagan opens tonight at Ovalhouse, London, playing until 12th November 2011. *£10 ticket offer (usually £14)* Valid for performances on 29th Oct and Tuesday 1st Nov only. Enter the code ‘HUB’ when booking online, OR, quote via the Box Office: 020 7582 7680.

The NHB playscript is available now, click here to purchase your copy for £9.99 with free UK P&P – add ‘Blog Offer’ in the comments field at checkout (to ensure your discount is applied when the order is processed).

WE ARE THREE SISTERS: with author Blake Morrison

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We Are Three Sisters jacket

We Are Three Sisters by Blake Morrison (£9.99)

Poet, playwright and novelist Blake Morrison grew up in striking distance from Haworth, the village once home to the Brontë family, and describes his latest play for Northern Broadsides, We are Three Sisters, as ‘a kind of homecoming’. Here he explains the enjoyment of dramatising the Brontë’s lives, lifting the gloom and misery so often written about, and using Chekhov’s Three Sisters as a guiding inspiration.

Charlotte Brontë liked to give the impression nothing of interest ever happened to her and her sisters – Haworth being a remote spot, and life at the parsonage lacking in incident. And yet the lives of the Brontës have been retold – on stage, on film, in fiction, even as ballet – as often as their novels have been adapted. That’s because they raise such fascinating questions. How did three sisters come to write such groundbreaking novels? What was the chemistry between them? Why did they adopt pseudonyms? What experience, if any, did they have of being in love? How did they cope with their wayward, drug- and booze-addicted brother Branwell? How congenial was the influence of their father Patrick, whose health they constantly worried about, but who outlived them all? How feminist were they? How political in their thinking? Far from being uneventful, the lives of the Brontës are so full of psychological interest and dramatic potential that it’s hard to know where to start.

For me the starting point was Chekhov, whose play Three Sisters explores many of the themes that preoccupied the Brontës: work, education, marriage, the role of women, the dangers of addiction, the risks of flirtation, the rival claims of country and city, the stirrings of political unrest. The parallels are no mere coincidence. According to Chekhov’s biographer, Donald Rayfield, one of the books he ordered for the library of his home town, Taganrog, and which he kept for nearly a month before sending it on, was an account of the Brontës by Olga Peterson (a Russian married to an Englishman). The fact that Chekhov’s dancing teacher at school was a Greek called Vrondi, and in demotic Greek (which Chekhov knew a little) Brontë and Vrondi are virtual homonyms, may have tickled his fancy still further…Wherever possible, I’ve tried to be true to the Brontës’ thoughts and feelings. As well as drawing on Juliet Barker’s biography, I’ve used words that appear in the novels, Charlotte’s letters, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography. Here, for example, is Gaskell’s account of Charlotte telling her father about Jane Eyre:

‘Papa, I’ve been writing a book.’

‘Have you, my dear?’

‘Yes, and I want you to read it.’

‘I’m afraid it will try my eyes too much.’

‘But it is not in manuscript: it is printed.’

‘My dear! You’ve never thought of the expense it will be!…’

The Brontë story is usually shrouded in darkness and misery. We are Three Sisters tries to disperse the gloom and to highlight resilience instead. Despite the tragic events of their childhood (the deaths of their mother and of two of their sisters), Charlotte, Emily and Anne were not pathetic victims of fate, but strong-minded, independent and resourceful women. Nor was Haworth a godforsaken spot in the back of beyond: as Juliet Barker shows in her marvellous biography of the Brontës, both the industry and the intellectual life of the region were thriving. Patrick Brontë has often been stereotyped as grim and reclusive. But he used his position to campaign fiercely for better education and sanitation for the people of Haworth. Another stereotype about the Brontës is their lack of humour. But there’s a playful air to some of Charlotte’s letters. I wouldn’t call We are Three Sisters a comedy, exactly, but with Chekhov’s encouragement I’ve tried to let in a little lightness.

WE ARE THREE SISTERS: REHEARSAL SHOT

Blake Morrison in rehearsal with Sophia Di Martino (Emily), Catherine Kinsella (Charlotte) and Rebecca Hutchinson (Anne). Photo by Nobby Clark.

This is an edited extract from the author’s Foreword to the published script. Blake Morrison’s new play – We are Three Sisters – is on tour throughout the UK with Northern Broadsides until 26th November 2011, click here for full tour details and to purchase tickets. NHB are proud to publish the playscript alongside the world premiere tour – to order your copy with free UK P&P click here and add ‘Blog Offer’ in the comments field at checkout (to ensure your discount is applied when the order is processed). Click here to watch the production trailer.

THE GOD OF SOHO Special: with director Raz Shaw

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Raz Shaw, director of The God of Soho

Raz Shaw, director of The God of Soho

In part two of our special feature on The God of Soho, director Raz Shaw tells us what it was like bringing Chris Hannan’s wild and raucous script to life for Shakespeare’s Globe.

You have previously directed productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet for the Shakespeare’s Globe, but this is your first contemporary play. How did you come to direct The God of Soho for the Globe’s distinctive space?

Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe phoned me up in November last year. He sent me Chris’s treatment version, which was gloriously mad – it made wonderful sense and at the same time didn’t make any sense. It was brave and courageous and rude, and funny and moving – and yet, in some ways, indecipherable. I thought there was so much in it, it was bursting at the seams. I had no idea what the end result might be, but there was something about it that was intriguing, exciting, unique and scary. And I only like to do work that scares me or there’s no point, I think.

'The God of Soho' Rehearsal Shot

Iris Roberts (Clem). Photo: Simon Kane

What has proven the biggest challenge, or surprise, in bringing the script to life for the first time?

I’ve discovered that doing a new play at the Globe means two things. One, you have to be very respectful to the author’s words. And two, you have to embrace the Globe in all its forms. Sometimes that means you need to direct a scene in a slightly different way, from how you might have done had it been indoors in a ‘conventional’ theatre. I think that what the Globe gives any play, especially a new play, is an extra resonance and relevance because it reaches out immediately to the audience, and the audience responds right there in the moment. In a really positive way, we hear the words more, we feel the emotions more and we listen to the story of the play more. So for me, the biggest challenge has been to imagine where it needs to sit – how it can resonate best in the Globe. I think the biggest surprise to me is that despite its huge moments – very funny moments, rude moments, very sexy moments – it’s actually about tiny emotional details. The story of the play is very real, it has three very real love stories; the biggest challenge is to make sure we focus on that and at the same time allow it to breathe in a theatre the size and style of the Globe.

With its large cast, sharp topicality and brash language, do you imagine that The God of Soho will be a popular choice for amateur performance in the future?

I do! It’ll be a fun journey to take. There are eleven actors in our cast, with two what are called ‘supernumerary actors’, who only come in for the final rehearsals and do simple, non-acting things, like opening doors and all that kind of stuff – but still feel part of the cast. With thirteen actors, and seven in the band, there are over 120 costumes in this show, as there are actually loads of characters.

The God of Soho: trailer image

Click to view The God of Soho trailer

Part of the fun of doing a play with loads of roles is that all the actors can have a main character, and then they can all kind of let go and have mini-characters too. For instance, there’s a song in the play called ‘Sexier than Sex’, which is very rude. It’s about the Goddess of Love’s journey into King’s Cross and Soho for the first time, and she’s looking for something to hold onto because she’s been rejected by her lover in heaven. One of the things she is hoping to find out is what sex is on Earth. The song is quite vulgar, and requires an assortment of characters from the sex trade, from prostitutes onwards, and would certainly be lots of fun for amateur performers.  Almost every single one of those little parts has something about it that would make it unique and fun to play. Even if those parts don’t have many lines, they certainly have some memorable moments.

Chris Hannan’s new play – The God of Soho – opens tonight (27 August) at Shakespeare’s Globe, running till 30 September. Click here to purchase tickets. NHB are proud to publish the playscript alongside this production – to order your copy with free UK P&P click here and add ‘Blog Offer’ in the comments field at checkout (to ensure your discount is applied when the order is processed).

The God of Soho: jacket

The God of Soho by Chris Hannan (£9.99)

*The God of Soho ticket + drink offer!*
A Yard ticket & a Post-Show Cocktail for just £10 when booking directly through the venue. Use the code ‘pcdsftw’ or quote ‘Something for the Weekend’ when calling the Shakespeare’s Globe box office on 020 7401 9919. Cannot be claimed retrospectively. Usual terms and conditions apply. Purchasers must be over the age of 18. Please note Yard tickets are standing only, but have the best view of the stage.

THE GOD OF SOHO Special: with author Chris Hannan

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Chris Hannan

Chris Hannan, author of The God of Soho (photo: Carol Gordon)

Chris Hannan’s new play for Shakespeare’s Globe, The God of Soho, is a wickedly funny morality tale for the modern world. Sexy, feisty and real, it is a story about love at its dirtiest, maddest and most bittersweet. Here, the author talks about writing the play specifically for the Globe’s unique stage.

When the Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Dominic Dromgoole, asked me to write a new play for his wonderful theatre, I spent a couple of years finding polite ways to say no.

It seemed too odd to put contemporary characters in contemporary clothes onto an authentic reproduction of an Elizabethan stage. Wouldn’t it just look like some ropey time-travel story?

Clearly, this was a space that called for big characters and big emotions and I began to sketch out the idea for The God of Soho, setting the story in a celebrity world where my celebrity couple fought each other in the front pages of the tabloids, hoovered up cocaine in celebrity nightspots and rocked up to the funerals of celebrity friends in dark sunglasses.

Where the Elizabethans had put kings and courtiers on stage, I thought I would put their contemporary equivalents – stars and their publicists. The inherent theatricality of the celebrity world – the constant performing in public – had an irresistible attraction. And of course celebrity worship is now at the core of our culture and economy, so it seemed an ideal topic for such a public space.

Celebrities could not have become the gods and goddesses of our mags and the staple of our news and gossip unless they answered some core need in all of us and The God of Soho is about what that is. It’s about what we worship and do we even know.

The God of Soho: jacket

The God of Soho by Chris Hannan (£9.99)

I kept going to see shows at the Globe to learn about the space and how it works. And, whether it was The Merry Wives of Windsor or Henry IV, I was struck by the magical relationship which exists between the actor and the audience – a frankness, an ease, an equality. Time and again it is a relationship which throws up unrepeatable moments of ‘liveness’.

It happened again during a recent performance of The Mysteries. The actors were telling the story of the Crucifixion – the episode where Judas repents of his betrayal and returns the blood money to Pontius Pilate. 

In the Globe production, the thirty pieces of silver is represented by thirty pence, and the actor playing Pontius Pilate – Matthew Pidgeon – joked amenably with the audience that he didn’t need thirty pence and would be happy to give it to a groundling. But when he placed the coins under the nose of a woman leaning on the front stage she viscerally recoiled, wanting nothing to do with the money or the betrayal.

The actor almost rocked back in amazement, and for me – looking on – the two of them created a moment that was deeply touching because I felt the emotional power of the story and understood that it mattered.

Other playwrights will see it differently, but to me the Globe stage requires a non-realistic story that has grand scale. It is not interested in minor details; it gobbles up narrative at considerable speed and you have to keep feeding it more. It wants movement, sweep. Because there is no stage lighting, you cannot get actors on and off in blackout – they need to be driven by some inner urgency. 

I enjoyed that. The God of Soho starts out in a heaven which is losing its sense of reality, plunges into a fetishistic Soho and heads out to celebrity Essex. The characters are gods and homeless people and rock stars; and the stage allows those disparate worlds to coexist because the characters are motored by the same story and the same needs. There can be realistic elements, yes, but only so long as they don’t distract from the sense of storyness.

Sections of this post by Chris Hannan first appeared in The Independent (18th August 2011).

Chris Hannan’s new play – The God of Soho – opens this Saturday (27 August) at Shakespeare’s Globe, running till 30 September. Click here to purchase tickets. NHB are proud to publish the playscript alongside this production – to order your copy with free UK P&P click here and add ‘Blog Offer’ in the comments field at checkout (to ensure your discount is applied when the order is processed).

Have you seen the production trailer yet? Click here.

*The God of Soho ticket + drink offer!*
A Yard ticket & a Post-Show Cocktail for just £10 when booking directly through the venue. Use the code ‘pcdsftw’ or quote ‘Something for the Weekend’ when calling the Shakespeare’s Globe box office on 020 7401 9919. Cannot be claimed retrospectively. Usual terms and conditions apply. Purchasers must be over the age of 18. Please note Yard tickets are standing only, but have the best view of the stage.

Coming up next…  THE GOD OF SOHO Special: with director Raz Shaw – on bringing the script to life for the first time.