Paines Plough Blog

This week has been a busy one for Forward Theatre Project as we have been casting our latest play Scarberia by Evan Placey which is being performed between 24th May – 2nd June at York Theatre Royal as part of the TakeOver ’12 Festival. The play was commissioned by the TakeOver team who are a group of young people between 11-26 years old and has been created by working directly with young people in York and Scarborough England and North York and Scarborough Toronto. We also set up an international pen pal system between the 4 groups of young people – which is all done on email nowadays apparently (losing the fun factor of receiving a letter in the post I think –  but definitely more time effective!) We wanted to create a play which was about youth and which engaged with young people at every level. We didn’t want to guess at what young people want to see on stage about their generation but to actually get them to commission the idea they want to see and be involved in its creation to ensure we were creating an authentic voice on stage.

The play looks at the areas of Scarborough in the two different countries. Both wildly different in reputation, we were interested in creating a play which looked at how these two different places with the same name can be connected by one event… a killing. The play has been created by working with FTP’s collective approach to making theatre; the writer came with the beginnings of an idea and then with the director Gemma Kerr and the designer Lydia Denno, the team have worked together at every level to develop the play by working with young people to inform its development. They undertook an intensive 5 week research and development period which involved going across to Toronto to work in their Scarborough – an exciting step for FTP as we start to create work internationally and as we are live streaming the show to our group of Canadian young people as part of the run.

So we begin rehearsals in 2 weeks…actually a week and a half now…eek, where did time go?! So castings are fairly late in the day because of the way the piece has been created but we are really excited about finally bringing the full team together. We have been in the Paines Plough rehearsal room all this week seeing lots of brilliant Yorkshire and Canadian accents come in and out and have just set down to make final decisions. The play is a total cast of 3; two boys that play the English and Canadian roles and a Canadian girl who has gone missing. All the roles are 15 years old so it is a big ask to play both this age and with two very different accents. Luckily as I am from Yorkshire I can cover that side, and Evan is from Toronto so we also have a Canadian voice in the room – definitely useful tools! Auditions are always exciting as it is finding the final piece of the puzzle for your team and we are certainly excited about finding the pieces left for this production. And at being part of TakeOver- a brilliant initiative set up by York Theatre Royal in which every role at the theatre is taken over by artists under 26 years old who then are mentored by their equivalent staff member to programme and run a three week arts festival across the Mainhouse, Studio and other found performance spaces. This year the TakeOver team are hugely exciting to work with and have programmed some brilliant companies including Paines Plough of course for their production of Wasted as well as getting companies such as Frantic Assembly to offer workshops on their work. It is going to be a fun start to the summer, once it stops raining…

Charlotte Bennett
Artistic Director
Forward Theatre Project

Here at Forward Theatre Project we are gearing up for our third scratch night, Scratch My City which is going to be at the Soho Theatre on Sunday 30th October. Our scratch nights started about a year ago now, a few months after we had been made anassociate company of Paines Plough. Paines Plough were a great support in helping us create a formula for our scratch nights – being a collective of 25 theatre directors,writers and designers, we were concerned with how the scratch nights could be used to help us build relationships within the collective, but also not always become a writer-led event. After a few trial and errors, and mentorship from George and James about how Scratch My City could develop, each time we are feeling happier about, finding the winning formula. One thing has remained constant with Scratch My City, and that is that it has always been a ‘venture into cross-region collaboration.’ One of FTP’s main aims is to create a community amongst peers and to build relationships between peers from all around the UK. With so many exciting emerging theatre companies working all around the country, we decided that Scratch My City would always involve a collaboration with another emerging theatre company who were based somewhere else in the UK.

 This time, we are really excited to be working with Left Luggage Theatre who are a designer-led company from Newcastle. Left Luggage have inspired us to do a designer-led scratch night for our next Scratch My City. After many a discussion with Left Luggage, FTP designers and FTP artists, we settled on exploring the idea of reversing the traditional theatre-making process. Typically, designers are given a play text to work on – in this text there will be certain things that the designer has to adhere to, for instance, if it is a play set in a cottage in Devon in the 1980s, this is already stipulated for them before they begin their design. So what we have decided to do is explore beginning the process with the design. Our design team are currently reading ‘Sorry Tales’ by Mick Jackson – a collection of macabre and idiosyncratic short stories that they are going to use to fuel a design concept or idea. These four design ideas are then being given to each of our four scratch groups (director-writer teams) who will then create a short piece of theatre which adheres to, inspires and uses one of these designs. The clearest example I can offer is one designer who gave the example of being interested in creating a visual time restriction on stage. He said he might give a group the design of several guillotines hanging in the space which all fall down at different times, and by the time the last one has fallen, the piece should be over. Eek…what are we letting ourselves in for?!

It is a complete experiment for us, but we are excited to see what may come out of it and we have a great line up of artists involved including directors Ellen McDougall, Jacqui Honess-Martin and Derek Bond, writers Ben Ellis, Alison Carr, Frazer Flintham and Gabriel Bisset-Smith and of course our wonderful Left Luggage Design team Verity Quinn, Anna Harding and Alison Garner.
One of the things we aim for in our scratch nights is high-quality production values. So all performances are off-book and as rehearsed as possible before the big day. This means the classic scenario of all groups trying to scramble around for rehesarsal space, casting through our casting director Fran Bradley and pulling everything together. It is at times like these that we are reminded of how valuable Paines Plough is as a support to the company. Not only because of the guidance and support they offer in terms of creatively developing the project but also practical support. Access to a central London rehearsal space with a toilet and a kettle is a god-send! As SMC is currently unfunded, being able to offer casts a nice and accessible space to rehearse is so much better than dragging them all the way to your living room in Balham!

Without Paines Plough’s generous support I think the scratch nights would not attract the same high quality artists or productions. The associate company status has also proved of great personal benefit to me over the past few months too. Sometimes I can tell myself that sitting at my laptop on my bed is working and productive, but some times (and this might not be helped by the fact that my bedroom is literally a bed-in-aroom) it just isn’t. Being able to bring my laptop and work at a desk space in an office environment has literally saved my work soul and means I am so much more productive. Also, excitingly, we have just been given our first grant from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to produce a project at York Theatre Royal next year (woop woop!) So over the next 6 months the whole company will be leaning on Paines Plough for more support as we prepare for this launching and running.

So, back to Scratch My City – we are getting ready to launch this Thursday night with all the teams coming together with their design packs and pairings and getting ready for a ‘on your marks, get set, go!’ scenario. It will be something new. It will be untested. Untried. A bit of an adventure. I cannot wait.

See you there, Soho Theatre cabaret space Sunday 30th October 7.45pm, www.sohotheatre.com
Charlotte

Artistic Director

Forward Theatre Project

www.forwardtheatreproject.co.uk

We’re thrilled to announce that the tenth and final playwright to feature as part of our programme 2011 is the superb Leo Butler. Leo wrote an exquisite short play as part of our 2010 project COME TO WHERE I’M FROM which you can listen to here.

Leo is joining Katie Douglas and David Watson to write a brand new play as part of our season of co-productions with Oran Mor in Glasgow.

Leo’s other plays include REDUNDANT, I’LL BE THE DEVIL and the searingly brutal FACES IN THE CROWD which tore apart the Royal Court Upstairs in 2008, in a scorching production by Clare Lizzimore. Clare is an extraordinary director, and we’re very excited to announce that she is also joining the Paines Plough fold this year, to helm Nick Payne’s play One Day When We Were Young.

As well as having directed new plays for the Royal Court Theatre, Clean Break, Theatre 503 and Hampstead Theatre (where she is an Associate Director), Clare is the Artistic Director of one of Paines Plough’s Associate Companies, Pieces Productions, for whom she directed David Watson’s devastating play PIECES OF VINCENT at the Arcola Theatre last year.

If you want to find out when and where you can see Leo and Clare’s work with us this year have a look at our programme brochure here, keep checking this blog or follow us on twitter.

The prize was awarded for Arinze’s recent play, ESTATE WALLS which was directed by our good friend Ché Walker and produced by Inner City Theatre, one of our Associate Companies who we support and mentor as an emerging theatre company with playwrights at their heart.

All of us at PP HQ thought the play was fantastic and can’t wait to see his new play LITTLE BABY JESUS at Oval House Theatre in May.

According to Lyn Gardner’s theatre tips, Coventry is the place to be this week, and I’ll be heading there myself on Saturday for another yummy installment of A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT.

FLY ME TO THE MOON by Marie Jones opens at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry on Thursday 30th. Check out this lovely review of the play in The Stage.

Also mentioned in Lyn’s theatre tips this week is ESTATE WALLS at Oval House Theatre, by one of our associate companies Inner City Theatre. We all saw it last week and it’s absolutely brilliant, so get your tickets before it ends on the 9th October!

We’re a bit lonely at PP HQ now as the cast of LOVE, LOVE, LOVE have left our rehearsal room and gone to Plymouth to finish rehearsing before the show opens at the Drum Theatre on the 7th.

To quote a text from Simon Darwen, ‘Missing the PP crew too…not the stairs though!Looking forward to you coming down.The rehearsal spaces are incredible and the place is lovely and sunny.xxx’

Rub it in guys!

The empty rehearsal room

With the launch of our new brand, website and 2010 programme of work, came the introduction of a new Paines Plough scheme whereby each year we offer support and resources to three fledgling theatre companies with new writing at their heart; the Paines Plough Associate Company Scheme.

Paines Plough began in 1974 when, over a pint of Paines bitter in The Plough pub, the company’s founders John Adams and David Pownall decided to start a company dedicated to touring new plays. 36 years later that entrepreneurial spirit is still strong in our new team’s approach to making as much work for as many people as possible all year round.

But we felt that there was little support available to new companies starting out and decided that in whatever way we could, we wanted to help people that share the commitment to getting brilliant new plays to audiences that lies at the heart of Paines Plough.

So it is with great pride that we introduce you to our first three Associate Companies; Forward Theatre Project, Inner City Theatre and Pieces Productions. They are all premiering new work this autumn and we can’t recommend highly enough that you check them out: