Paines Plough Blog

We’re super excited to announce our full Programme 2012 today.

We’re presenting 11 productions in 44 places across the country from Edinburgh to The Isle of Wight.

Some stuff you already know about, like Matt Hartley‘s SIXTY FIVE MILES which we co-produced earlier in the year with our friends at Hull Truck, and the two shows we have currently running in London – Mike Bartlett‘s LOVE, LOVE, LOVE at The Royal Court and Kate Tempest’s WASTED at The Roundhouse.

In addition we’ve lined up some real treats for you, wherever you live. WASTED continues its tour to festivals in Brighton and York. There’s a national tour of our Manchester International Festival smash hit soul opera THE 8TH by Paul Heaton & Che Walker culminating with a very special performance at The Latitude Festival. Simon Stephens’ LONDON opens its tour at Salisbury Playhouse in a co-production with both Salisbury and Live Theatre, Newcastle.

For the first time in three years, we’re presenting a season of work across London, all of which has premiered outside the capital. Love, Love, Love is currently running at the Royal Court. Wasted visits the Roundhouse. The 8th opens its tour at The Barbican. And we’re thrilled to be bringing our Roundabout Season to to town in the Autumn. Three new plays by Duncan Macmillan, Nick Payne and Penelope Skinner will be presented in our own purpose built portable in-the-round Roundabout auditorium at Shoreditch Town Hall.

Also we’re bringing back our 2009 hit GOOD WITH PEOPLE by David Harrower for The Edinburgh Festival. A new series of Come to Where I’m From will include playwrights from Brighton, Cheltenham, Chipping Norton and the Isle Of Wight; and we’re delighted to again be working with the students at Rose Bruford College on Sean Buckley’s SMITHEREENS.

Here’s a note from James & George:

“We’re hugely proud to announce our third annual programme of work as Paines Plough’s Artistic Directors.

“Our passion for new plays continues to grow thanks to the extraordinary playwrights that lie at the heart of our company. This year we’re presenting work by a huge range of writers, from Olivier Award winners to the stars of the future.writers who between them have won 2 Oliviers, 3 George Devine Awards, 2 Bruntwood Awards and a host of other accolades, whilst continuing to identify and support the stars of the future.

“We believe everyone should have the chance to see outstanding new plays, no matter where they live, so our commitment to national touring deepens this year with visits to over 40 different UK villages, towns and cities. We’re piloting new touring circuits The Local, Neighbourhood and Campus to make sure our unique brand of new plays reach every corner of the UK.

“After two years working outside the capital, we’ve been overwhelmed by the demand for our work to be seen in London. In response we’ve put together a London Season of productions, all of which have already been seen on tour. In typical Paines Plough style they’re spread right across the city so audiences can experience the work in their local theatre – whether that’s Shoreditch Town Hall, the Barbican, the Royal Court, the Roundhouse or the Albany, amongst others.

“As ever, we’re working in partnership across the programme, and are delighted to be working with old friends as well as new – including the National Theatre, Manchester International Festival, the Roundhouse, Birmingham Rep, Sheffield Theatres, Latitude Festival, National Student Drama Festival, Salisbury Playhouse and Live Theatre Newcastle.

“With these partners, we’re presenting astounding new plays by world class playwrights in places nationwide for people everywhere. We’re priveleged and excited to do so, and look forward to welcoming people to a Paines Plough show in their local theatre.”

So there you have it: Programme 2012. We hope you’re as excited by it as we are.

We recently announced that our smash hit co-production with Manchester International Festival of Paul Heaton and Che Walker‘s THE 8TH is hitting the road this summer. Presented by SJM Concerts, the tour opens at the massive Barbican Centre before rocking up to Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham and Southwold.

In advance of the tour, Proper Records are releasing a studio recording of the show. It’s Paines Plough’s first ever album release so we’re pretty excited.

Before it hits the charts, we wanted to give a heads-up that you can now pre-order the album from Play.com and Amazon by clicking on the logos below:

You can read all about THE 8TH on this blog.

Last week we announced that 2011′s co-production with the Manchester International Festival of Paul Heaton and Che Walker‘s THE 8TH is embarking on a national tour this summer.

Thanks to SJM, THE 8TH can be seen in London, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham and Southwold.

In the advert above – which appeared in The Sunday Times last week – the show is described as a ‘Soul Opera’ which we reckon is a PP first.

In case you missed what the show was all about last time around, here are some links to get you up to speed:

• THE 8TH Blog
• Video interviews with Paul Heaton, Reg E Cathey and Jacqui Abbott
• An instrumental version of the first 5 minutes of THE 8TH playing over exclusive behind-the-scenes photos
• An article in The Guardian about the show
• An article in The Independent about the show
• An article in the Manchester Evening News about the show

The album of THE 8TH is being released on 2nd July by Proper Records which we think is PP’s first ever record release. Watch this blog for updates.

You can follow links to buy ticket for the show, which are selling fast, here: http://www.painesplough.com/current-programme/by-date/the-8th

You can also catch the show at the Latitude Festival where we’re headlining the Music and Film Arena on the Thursday night.

As the last one standing in the PP office at 5pm on the day before Christmas eve I thought I’d say one last goodbye to 2011 with a pictoral journey through Paines Plough’s Programme 2011.

Over the past 12 months more than 24,000 people saw one of 11 new plays by 15 different playwrights in one of 39 different places across the UK. Thank you to everyone who contributed, came, saw, enjoyed and supported – we hope to see you in your local theatre in 2012.

It’s nearly Christmas, and we’ve reached the end of another fabulous year at Paines Plough.

Programme 2011 is now complete and we’ve had a brilliant time over the year, working with 15 playwrights, and touring 11 productions to 39 places where 24,868 of you have come to see one of our shows. Thank you to everyone who joined us as we made our way around the UK, we hope you’ve enjoyed our shows.

Here’s a quick round-up of Programme 2011:

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE

We started the year with our co-producers Drum Theatre, Plymouth on our spring tour of Mike Bartlett’s LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, which we are delighted won the award for Best New Play at the 2011 Theatre Awards UK last month, and has been shortlisted for Best Regional Production in the upcoming Whatsonstage Awards.

Here are some of the reviews from the tour:

“Bang-on-the-money new play… required viewing.”
★★★★★ The Telegraph

“Devastating precision… peppered with terrific lines and big laughs”
★★★★ The Guardian

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE will return in Programme 2012 in a brand new production at the Royal Court in April. You can book tickets here.

Read the LOVE, LOVE, LOVE blog here.

TINY VOLCANOES

We then returned to the Liverpool Everyman with our co-production of Laurence Wilson’s TINY VOLCANOES, before taking the show on the road for its second national tour.

Here’s what some of you said about the show:

“Wild and exciting, terribly funny”
Audience member, Trowbridge

“Excellent, thoughtful, great performance, please come back to Folkestone”
Audience member, Folkestone

“Very engaging, challenging and entertaining”
Audience member, Harrogate

Read the TINY VOLCANOES blog here.

THE 8TH

In July we hit festival season, and collaborated with Manchester International Festival on THE 8TH by Paul Heaton and Ché Walker, which played for three nights at The Pavilion Theatre and starred Reg E Cathey.

Have a look at some production shots from the show.

Read THE 8TH blog here.

WASTED

Later in July we braved the rain and took to the muddy fields of the Latitude Festival in Suffolk, where we premiered WASTED by Kate Tempest alongside our co-producers Birmingham Repertory Theatre and The Roundhouse, and our friends at NSDF.

We’re touring WASTED in spring 2012 and will be announcing dates in the new year. Keep an eye on our website for updates, and in the mean time check out our production shots from Latitude here, and watch our online trailer here.

Read the WASTED blog here.

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT

The second half of the year saw us tour three new plays in co-production with Òran Mór in Glasgow, in our A Play, A Pie and A Pint season. We opened the season with DIG by Katie Douglas, which was followed by YOU CANNOT GO FORWARD FROM WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW by David Watson, and JUICY FRUITS by Leo Butler.

Here are some reviews on each of the plays:

DIG
“Devastatingly effective”
★★★★ Edinburgh Evening News

YOU CANNOT GO FORWARD FROM WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW
“Funny, intelligent, observant”
★★★★ Edinburgh Guide

JUICY FRUITS
“Brilliantly witty, acerbic and dark…”
★★★★ The Public Reviews

Read the A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT blog here.

THE ROUNDABOUT SEASON

In October, we opened the first ever Roundabout Season in partnership with Sheffield Theatres. The season consisted of three new plays, performed by an ensemble cast in our prototype Roundabout Auditorium which lived in the Crucible Studio for two months. We opened the season with ONE DAY WHEN WE WERE YOUNG by Nick Payne, followed by LUNGS by Duncan Macmillan and THE SOUND OF HEAVY RAIN by Penelope Skinner.

Here are some Tweets about each of the plays:

@MatthewDPlant: @painesplough @crucibletheatre #OneDayWhenWeWereYoung: stunningly emotive/engaging. Original/ innovative scene changes with costume. BRILL.

@lyngardner: Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs at Sheffield Crucible is fab. Edgy, anxious, very funny, horribly honest and completely now. #stage

@Cory_face: Enjoyed ‘The Sound of Heavy Rain’ by @painesplough + @crucibletheatre brave but silly, consciously stylised and dramatically justified. See!

You can watch a film about The Roundabout Auditorium here, or read more here.

Read the Roundabout blog here.

COME TO WHERE I’M FROM

To close Programme 2011, we staged COME TO WHERE I’M FROM : JERSEY with playwrights Ben Evans, Leon Fleming, Martha MacDonald, Hannah Patterson and Colin Scott performing their own 15 minute pieces inspired by the place they grew up. The event took place at the Jersey Opera House and was part of The Big Room, and organised by the Jersey Arts Trust.

You will soon be able to hear podcasts of the plays on our website. In the mean time, have a listen to some of the podcasts from COME TO WHERE I’M FROM 2010 here.

Read the COME TO WHERE I’M FROM blog here.

So that was the year that was. We’ve had a ball. Bring on 2012.

If you saw any of our shows this year, please post a comment and let us know what you thought.

We’re back from Manchester after an extraordinary seven days at the International Festival, where our much-anticipated World Premier of THE 8TH completed an exclusive 3-performance run.

In case you missed them, here are a few articles about the show, where the idea behind the project is explained in more detail:

“Paul Heaton confesses all”, The Guardian

“Paul Heaton debuts ‘longest pop song ever’”, The Independent

“Paul Heaton’s taking a new direction”, Manchester Evening News

As we reported on Wednesday last week, this show has been unlike anything we have done before. Comprising of a band of four, a string quartet, eight singers and a solo actor, the show sits somewhere between a staged concert and theatricalised gig.

Here are two interviews with Paul Heaton, the driving creative force behind the show, where he talks about how the piece came together – one on BBC Radio 4′s Front Row and one on BBC6 Music.

We had only three days to rehearse the piece, with the majority of the 17-strong ensemble meeting each other for the first time on day 1. I spent the first two days rehearsing with our lead actor, Reg E. Cathey (The Wire’s Norman Wilson from series four), whilst Paul rehearsed with the musicians and singers. On Wednesday last week we had 14 hours to bring the two elements together – Reg’s narrative monologue and Paul’s eight-part soul pop symphony. The next day we had just 9 hours to transfer the entire stage set-up to the venue, sound-check, build a 200-cue lighting plot, technically rehearse and dress rehearse, before the show opened to the public at 8pm.

Thanks to the incredible efforts of the whole team (and in particular our supremo Lighting Designer Tim Deiling), by 7pm we were just about getting there.

Then suddenly, at 7.15pm, with five of the ensemble on stage, the back wall of the auditorium started slowly leaning forward, finally crash landing on to all the instruments just as Reg leaped from the stage to safety.

This piece of truss is supposed to be vertical, not horizontal

With the paramedics rushing in and the MIF technical team rallying support from across the city, we all agreed – in something of a state of shock – that we’d never known anything like this. It seemed a certainty that despite the adage, the show would not go on.

The MIF team, led by the formiddable Jack Thompson, soon had the truss and cyc wall back upright and firmly secured. But as the band cautiously crept back on stage to examine their crushed equipment, with keyboard-player Christian digging his damaged Korg from beneath a pile of lanterns, we had word that Reg had torn ligaments in his knee as he landed from his life-saving leap and would need an operation. A show 12 months in the making was hanging by a thread.

Then just as we were about to give up hope, THE 8TH was pulled back from the brink of cancellation. Within the space of 19 minutes Reg had resolved that a knee-strap, a few codine and a large bourbon was all he needed to soldier on, Tim re-rigged all the fallen lights from the floor up (effectively inverting his design), and band-member Android Pete (so-called for his incredible range of musical crafts – drums, violin, mandolin…) added crude electronics to his CV as he strategically shoved a piece of shrapnel in to Christian’s key-board to get it working again. Only an hour over-due, the first ever performance of THE 8TH opened to Manchester’s capacity crowd.

Reg E. Cathey performing The 8th (Photo: Joel Chester Fildes)

It was a brave performance, full to the brim of adrenaline, that finally brought its audience to their feet. Needless to say, one or two beers were had after the show.

Paul Heaton performing THE 8TH (Photo: Joel Chester Fildes)

There are some more photos of the performance on our Flickr page, here.

The team were then back in at the crack of dawn on both Friday and Saturday, desperately working against the clock to try and get the show back to where we needed it to be. Without sheer adrenaline to fuel them, the performances grew in a natural confidence, and by Saturday night we were lifting off.

Here’s what twitter had to say:

We’re all very proud of the show and hope that we can find a way in the coming months to give it a longer and wider life. If you saw it we’d love to know what you thought. We’ll soon have some live audio and video from the performances, so if you don’t live close enough to Manchester to have been able to see it, you can let us know whether you’d like us to try and bring it to a theatre near you one day.

We’re three days in to a four day rehearsal/tech/dress/open schedule for Paul Heaton and Che Walker’s THE 8TH at the Manchester International Festival – and we’re firing on all cylinders.

Reg, Che and I started our week at the Royal Exchange Theatre rehearsal rooms whilst the rest of the team – four piece band, string quartet, Paul and a collection of exquisite singers – worked through the music at Blueprint Studios, on the other side of the river from Deansgate, in Salford.

The band and singers in rehearsal

Then yesterday, after nearly 12 months of conceiving, writing, re-conceiving and re-writing this audacious project, we finally pieced the whole thing together. It was rough, but it worked. Fundamentally, and despite jagged edges, what Paul dreamt up over a year ago, works brilliantly. It was a thrilling moment for every one of the 20+ artists, technicians and stage management in the room.

Reg E. Cathey rehearsing on stage at the Pavillion Theatre

But as quickly as the euphoria arrived, the realisation that we now had something on our hands that could be extraordinary speedily dawned, and it was back to work rehearsing, honing, calibrating, reworking and modulating a rough-hewn piece of patchwork in to a glorious tapestry.

I’m fast-learning that the rock’n'roll world isn’t quite the same as the theatre world; our usually regimented breaks are wholly elastic and involve any combination of minutes and hours the collective see fit: for coffee-breaks, substitute beer-breaks; and for a rehearsal to restart, it only takes any one of the ten band-members to strike up and we’re away. There’s something glorious about the anarchy of it all.

After our final day of rehearsals today we have a gruelling 8-hour LX plot, sound set-up and check, tech rehearsal and dress rehearsal, before the World Premiere of Paul Heaton and Che Walker’s THE 8TH is unleashed on the world.

Let the games begin.

This July will see Paines Plough decamp, tents and all, to the Latitude Festival as well as flying further afield to two international festivals. Regulars at Latitude, this year the company return to premiere their new commission – Wasted – the debut play from celebrated poet and rapper Kate Tempest. In two firsts for Paines Plough, the company make their Manchester International Festival debut with the premiere of The 8th – a collaboration between Paul Heaton and Ché Walker; and Mike Bartlett’s critically acclaimed smash hit play Love, Love, Love plays its first international dates at the Galway Festival.

Artistic Directors James Grieve and George Perrin said this week, “We’re honoured to be taking work to three extraordinary and yet completely different festivals this month. We’ve had the privilege of working with Tania Harrison at Latitude since the festival began and have watched it flourish in the five years since. Co-commissioning with the Manchester International Festival is a thrilling partnership for us and testament, we hope, to Paines Plough’s profile as a partner in unique, playwright-focused collaborations. And after 114 performances and 22 weeks of touring throughout England and Scotland, Love, Love, Love makes its Irish debut as one of only two English companies at the prestigious Galway Arts Festival. It’s incredibly exciting to be bringing the work of three exceptional playwrights to these diverse festival audiences.”

Read the full Press Release.

The Pavillion Theatre will play home to The 8th

We now have a full complement of artists for The 8^th, which rehearses, opens and closes all within just seven days from today. Paul and his band have put together a formidable line-up of singers, each of whom will sing one of seven sections of the piece, with Paul himself singing The 8^th. We’ve put together a playlist of some great tracks by the featured artists, which you can listen to here.

Lust Wayne Gidden

Gluttony Kenny Anderson (aka King Creosote)

Greed Simon Aldred (aka Cherry Ghost)

Wrath Aaron Wright

Envy Jacqui Abbott

Sloth Yvonne Shelton

Pride Mike Greaves

The 8^th Paul Heaton

The Pavillion Theatre

I was in Manchester on Thursday night for the opening of the Festival and to see Bjork’s BIOPHILIA. Having grown up just south of Manchester, it is always a thrill to come back to the city, and it was looking as magnificent as ever, sparkling in the evening sun.

Magnificent Manchester