Paines Plough Blog

So yesterday we rather excitingly announced our full Programme for 2012 which includes new plays touring far and wide, from Aberdeen to Exeter and everywhere in between. One of the biggest things we announced yesterday was THE ROUNDABOUT SEASON coming to Shoreditch Town Hall after a successful run at our co-producers’ venue Sheffield Theatres and tickets go on sale at the National Theatre Box Office TOMORROW morning at 10am.

The three brilliant new plays we’re bringing to Shoreditch are by some of the top writers in British Theatre- Duncan Macmillan, Nick Payne, and Penelope Skinner and we couldn’t be more pleased that their plays are going to be seen by new audiences this Autumn in our ROUNDABOUT Auditorium- previews start 19^th September and the Season runs until 27^th October 2012.

For those of you who don’t know about these cracking plays, here’s what they’re all about:

LUNGS by Duncan Macmillan

I could fly to New York and back every day for seven years and still not leave a carbon footprint as big as if I have a child. Ten thousand tonnes of CO2. That’s the weight of the Eiffel Tower. I’d be giving birth to the Eiffel Tower.

In a time of global anxiety, terrorism, erratic weather and political unrest, a young couple want a child but are running out of time. If they over think it, they’ll never do it. But if they rush, it could be a disaster.

They want to have a child for the right reasons. Except, what exactly are the right reasons? And what will be the first to destruct – the planet or the relationship?

ONE DAY WHEN WE WERE YOUNG by Nick Payne

I am actually incredibly scared.  And not how you might think.  I am scared, that once this war is over, and I am sent home, that you won’t be here.  That you will have left.

When Leonard and Violet embark on their first night together, they know it also might be their last. It’s 1942 and in a small hotel room in Bath, the couple prepare for Leonard’s departure to war, and dream of what the future may bring. As the bombs begin to fall, they know their world won’t ever be the same again.

But the world keeps turning and in the year 2002, the couple must decide what was lost and what was gained.

A new play about the impact of the Second World War on two ordinary lives and a love that spans more than sixty years.

THE SOUND OF HEAVY RAIN by Penelope Skinner

Laughing. Talking. Hours in cafes drinking coffee. Chatting about boys. Girls. Romance. Sharing a plate of chips. It was one of those friendships…I don’t know how to explain…like…Love.

Cabaret singer Foxie O’Hara vanished without a tweet two weeks ago from Mrs Whistle’s Lodge.

On that very same night Foxie’s friend Maggie Brown, a temporary secretary, announced her engagement to local businessman Dougal Cheese.

Concerned and desperate Maggie seeks the help of Dabrowski  P.I. to find her missing friend.

But before Dabrowski can blow the whistle on the mystery of Foxie O’Hara he must delve into the history of the girls’ relationship; the deeper he digs, the darker the case becomes, until the real question he needs to answer isn’t ‘where is Foxie’….but ‘who is Foxie’?

 How to book tickets:

At Paines Plough we’re all about the playwright and making sure that as many people as possible get the chance to see their moving, gripping, powerful new plays and that’s why we’re so thrilled to be bringing them to Shoreditch Town Hall.

The tickets are £20 each or if you fancied seeing all three plays on the same day there are a limited number of tickets which are £45 but you have to book those on the phone by calling the National Theatre Box Officeon 020 7452 3000.

For full performance schedule and  tickets you can also book via their website at nationaltheatre.org.uk

The end of our second week at the Chocolate Factory and the phenomenon of ‘nibbles’ has taken over the rehearsal room. Mr Miles is initially to blame for filling a small prop glass goblet full of wasabi peas and placing them centre-stage (on our desk). For those of you who haven’t tried them yet, stay away, wasabi peas are addictive. But perhaps not as addictive as the salted edamame beans which followed the next day. And when they are so well presented, who can resist? After that, it became quite a tradition of attempting and failing (“right, this really, really is my last one”, “will someone please take these away?!”) to stop compulsively munching. A lovely present from Claire, the General Manager at Paines Plough, had a detrimental effect when the goblet became a cornucopia of Haribo. A very hyper rehearsal session followed. Mr Miles finally ended the craze by sobering us up with dried fruit and nuts instead of crunchy/salty/sugary treats. Remarkably fewer visits to our desk today.

My musical knowledge has expanded considerably since working on Mr Bartlett‘s play. Having missed out in my teens, I am now having my “Stone Roses moment” and enjoying it considerably.

Rehearsals are in a great place. We are already running full Acts and solid shapes are beginning to form. Each time a scene is run it brings with it new improvisations, details and startling moments. It has become increasingly clear that this is the type of exciting realism that director Mike Alfreds champions as truly live theatre; theatre which is “creative, spontaneous, curious, enterprising [and] responsive to others”. It is a delight to watch.

The production side of things is ticking along at a great pace with new pieces of furniture being lugged up the steep Factory steps each day. Intelligent (and unintelligible) technical talk of plug sockets, gutted televisions and tiles make me glad I am only a director and doubly grateful that we have such professionals working to make this show happen.

(Caitlin McLeod, Assistant Director)

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

We’re four days in to rehearsals on what will be our first production of ‘Programme 2012’ – Matt Hartley’s SIXTY FIVE MILES.

From the rehearsal room here at PP HQ, we’ve spent the majority of the week exploring the world of the play – Sheffield, Chesterfield and Hull in 2005 – as well as establishing what we know of the characters’ back-story: the situation that exists before the play starts. Having read slowly through the play, we now have around 12 pages of information that we know to be true of the characters, the relationships and the situation in the 30 or so years leading up to the beginning of the play’s story. To accompany that, we have about twice as many pages of questions relating to the same time-period that we will need collectively to answer over the next week or so of rehearsals. This process helps us as a company to objectively assess what is known and unknown and, with Matt, to jointly build up a clear shared understanding of the time, places, events, relationships and characters that exist before the play begins.

It’s a method rooted in Stanislavsky’s approach to text that is brilliantly broken down in to rehearsal activities in Katie Mitchell’s new book on theatre directing, The Director’s Craft.

Having the chance to direct this beautiful, funny and tender play is a true privilege. When I worked for Paines Plough as an Assistant Director under Roxana Silbert, I directed a reading of a very early draft of the play. At the time, Matt was a member of Paines Plough and Channel 4’s Future Perfect group. Future Perfect was an annual scheme that ran for four years, attaching 6 playwrights each year to Paines Plough and Channel 4, including Nick Payne (ONE DAY WHEN WE WERE YOUNG), Katie Douglas (DIG), Penelope Skinner (THE SOUND OF HEAVY RAIN), as well as Matt himself. There’s something thrilling about now directing the play, having begun a relationship with it at its inception.

We are co-producing the play with our friends at Hull Truck Theatre as part of their 40^th Anniversary Season – a real honour after having worked with Sheffield Theatres this year on Roundabout in the culmination to their own 40^th Anniversary Year.

SIXTY FIVE MILES opens at Hull Truck Theatre on Wednesday 1 February 2012. You can book tickets here.

It’s been a busy Autumn for Paines Plough, with shows on in Sheffield, Glasgow, Manchester and Coventry simultaneously but despite our team being split all over the country we’ve still managed to catch plenty of theatre all over the shop and the festive period is looking pretty good for our culture calendar too…

James and I caught Tom Wells’ brilliant new play The Kitchen Sink at the Bush on press night.  It’s selling out but the run has been extended til 23^rd Dec, so there’s still chance to catch this extraordinary new play.

Claire and Hanna loved April de Angelis’ JUMPY at the Royal Court, Tara caught Polar Bear’s OLD ME at the Roundhouse and we all went on a PP office social to see OFFICE PARTY at the Pleasance which was an absolute hoot!

We were big fans of Michael Sheen’s HAMLET at the Young Vic, Jez Butterworth’s JERUSALEM (it just gets better…) at the Apollo, BLACKBERRY TROUT FACE by the superb Laurence Wilson (who wrote TINY VOLCANOES which we toured earlier this year), and ONE MAN TWO GUVNORS by Richard Bean at the Adelphi.

We’re very excited about seeing COMEDY OF ERRORS with Lenny Henry and directed by Dominic Cooke at the National, I’m off to see Michael Grandage’s last show at the helm of the Donmar- RICHARD II with Eddie Redmayne at the weekend and James saw Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin’s hit adaptation of MATILDA at the Cambridge Theatre and can still be found humming the songs around the office…

Last week Claire and Tara headed up to Sheffield (quickly becoming our second home) to see the Crucible’s revival of Sondheim’s COMPANY with Daniel Evans and Samantha Spiro which was brilliantly entertaining! And speaking of Sheffield we had a great time there two weeks ago when the whole team got together to see our ROUNDABOUT season; Nick Payne’s ONE DAY WHEN WE WERE YOUNG, Duncan Macmillan’s LUNGS and THE SOUND OF HEAVY RAIN by Penelope Skinner.

So what are we seeing over Christmas? Our panto withdrawal from last year will be soothed by trips to ALADDIN at the Lyric Hammersmith and SLEEPING BEAUTY at Sheffield’s Lyceum. We’ll be at the National next week for Daniel Kitson’s IT’S ALWAYS RIGHT NOW, UNTIL IT’S LATER which I’ve been dying to see since it debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe back in 2010. Claire’s off to see Matthew Bourne’s NUTCRACKER at Sadler’s Wells on Tuesday and Tara will be going to Kurt Weill’s MAGICAL NIGHT at the Royal Opera House later this week. Other treats in store are Reuben Johnson’s THE PROPOSAL produced by exciting young company Fiddy West Productions at Theatre 503, Joe Penhall’s HAUNTED CHILD at the Royal Court and Dawn King’s FOXFINDER at The Finborough.

Wowzer, there’s a whole lot of theatre for you.

What have you been seeing? Any top tips for theatre trips over Christmas?

Having spent three years at uni in Sheffield, and being born and bred in Manchester, I understand that up North is gets cold. However, this week Sheffield is COLD. Arriving into the train station on Friday evening, it was seriously chilly. So when I came to spend the day in the rehearsal room for The Sound of Heavy Rain, the last play in our Roundabout Season, co produced with Sheffield Theatres, I was glad to be armed with a big, woolly coat.

Now, if you’re anywhere even remotely close to Sheffield at the moment you’ll know that it is ALL going on at the Crucible for their 40^th Birthday celebrations. This week the cast of Company moved up to carry on their rehearsals in the steel city, alongside the casts of the first Sheffield People’s Theatre production- Lives In Art, Invisible Flock’s interactive performance Fanfared and Rationale’s In My Shoes. So, with all of this happening, Paines Plough have migrated for a couple of days, across the road to the rather beautiful rehearsal space of Channing Hall.

Andy, James and Maia in rehearsals...apologies for the poor photography!

The room we were rehearsing in was opened in MDCCCLXXXI  (1881- Turns out James is pretty hot on his Roman Numerals…) and is a HUGE room with carved wooden beams, mosaics, chandelier light fittings and plaques galore. It’s a lovely space to rehearse in, but as the weather had taken a turn for the worse and this big old room was unused over the weekend the radiators took a little while to kick in. However, soon enough, everyone had warmed up and were on form for a packed day of rehearsals.

The Sound of Heavy Rain is a pastiche of the usual detective story and is jam packed with chuckle inducing moments meaning that rehearsals were filled with plenty of giggles on and off the stage. Highlights included a discussion on the merits of acting opposite an old school wooden mop rather than your new fangled plastic Vileda, and an impromptu break in rehearsals while Andy (playing P.I Dabrowski) climbed into a wheelie hold-all (one of the props, not just something PP have lying around the rehearsal room) to see if he could fit- (he could, with plenty of room to spare- the bag is THAT big). Another welcome impromptu break came when Maia (playing Maggie Brown) produced Chocolate and Pecan Pie- a seriously delicious dessert giving us all the sugar rush to push through to the end of the day.

Andy, Maia and Channing Hall in all its glory

The show opens next Wednesday (15^th) for the Public Dress (tickets are a total bargain at £1 from the Crucible Box Office on the day) and is really coming together now; it was fascinating to see the actors putting the final touches to their characters, whilst Louise (our ASM) was out sourcing props and organising costume fittings before doing a run through in front of the writer, Penny Skinner, later in the week. What made Monday even more exciting for the company was that Penny was shortlisted for the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, something which everyone at Paines Plough is very happy about!

So what can you expect from our last instalment in the Roundabout trilogy? Some super new writing, singing, dancing, body bags, mops and so much more…Sheffield, you’re in for a treat!