And now, a post I’m very excited to share with you. Following on from my review of The Card and my subsequent award as Best Production 2023, Deborah McAndrew from Claybody Theatre got in touch we me and asked me if I would like to take a look at their new space. Until now, Claybody Theatre has been doing a series of performances in ad-hoc venues (co-production with the New Vic excepted), but they are now leasing the Dipping House in Stoke for a year.
As I live in Durham rather than Stoke, this had to wait until January when I was next travelling to Stoke anyway (for The Nutcracker – good review coming), but once I was there I was delighted to take the opportunity to ask Conrad Nelson and Deborah McAndrew all about their plans – and also how they got here.
The background of Claybody Theatre is truly an extraordinary one. The husband-and-wife team of director Conrad Nelson and writer Deborah McAndrew for many years practically operated as a theatre company in its own right within Northern Broadsides, and when artistic director Barrie Rutter announced his retirement, it seems a foregone conclusion that they would take over the company. But instead, after a year as caretaker leadership, the astonished the theatre world by announcing they were leaving completely to instead focus on their side-project Claybody Theatre, dedicated to a hyper-local target audience of Stoke-on-Trent. It seemed like a crazy gamble, but last year’s outstanding production of The Card – on every bit the grand scale of their Northern Broadsides days – vindicates that decision.
So how did they rise through the ranks of Northern Broadsides. What made them surprise us all by switching to a new company. And how do they plan to use their success for the future. For fifty-five minutes, I had the chance to hear all about it.
What’s great about this place is the “found space” thing, which was a lot to do with the early doors of Northern Broadsides, finding somewhere to play. So there’s a familiar tale in finding ex-industrial spaces, they’ve got a real magic to them when you come in.
This is a different interview. I am, for once, interviewing two different people at the same time: Conrad Nelson and Deborah McAndrew: once with Northern Broadsides, now with Claybody Theatre. I am in their latest venue, which we will be getting to soon. But we’re going to start from the beginning.
The beginning as far as I know you is Northern Broadsides. Shall we start there, or is there anything further back me need to know about?
Deborah: Not really, that’s as good a place to start as any, unless you’ve got anything, Conrad?
Conrad: What was the first show you saw with Northern Broadsides?
I think I saw The Merry Wives of Windsor at Saltburn Valley Gardens when Northern Broadsides had just started.
Conrad: Oh, did you?
Deborah: Wow.
I didn’t make the connection until much later though.
Deborah: You must have been very young.
Yes, I was quite young.
Conrad: Yes, I think we did that one in clear pac-a-macs, so you could see the costume under the raincoat – but it rained for three weeks.
Deborah: But you and I have got something in common, because this was the first production of Northern Broadsides that I saw. So I didn’t join the company until 1995, and that would have been ’93. I was in Corrie at the time, then I left and wanted to work in the theatre. So I saw that and I saw it at Salt Mills.
Conrad: So it was on that tour, part of that British leg. That was quite early doors.
Deborah: That was only the second thing. I didn’t see the first, that Richard III.
Conrad: You must have got wet!
I think ours was no rain, just lots of midges.
Conrad: It was one or the other. Raining or midges … It was good, the British audience tend to stick their coats on and stay. We never cancelled a performance.
They don’t do it now, sadly, but for quite a long time there were summer performances in the Valley Gardens.
Conrad: Yeah, we only did it once, that three weeks in the rain was enough to kill us off. But we were quite resilient, because-
Deborah: We did do outdoor performances after that.
Conrad: It’s cold in here today obviously, we’ve not had any heating on, but when we did King Lear, around the country, in ex-mill rooms with no windows, in winter, I was playing Poor Tom, basically nude apart from a loin cloth. That was extreme playing. And people stayed.
What’s great about this place is the “found space” thing, which was a lot to do with the early doors of Northern Broadsides, finding somewhere to play. So there’s a familiar tale in finding ex-industrial spaces, they’ve got a real magic to them when you come in.
Deborah: And they’re very connected, whether it’s a mill in Oldham or a pottery in Stoke, or Skipton Cattle market with a rural community coming to see a show where we played quite often.
Conrad: And Broadsides was one of the few companies that played that place. It was certainly instrumental in making it to arts and culture venues.
There were plenty of jobs before Broadsides, and in between, but we’ve learned from that wanting to play any space. The idea that you come into a room, you look around and think “I can play that, we can do a show here”. And that’s still got a bit of magic about it.
Deborah: The audience love the connection to the building, and I personally love the deeper heritage of being a player, being a performer, and being the same as our forebears who did just rock up on a wagon.
Conrad: Get your kit out.
Deborah: And there’s something a bit troubadourish about it all, I like the thought of that. It’s not a comfortable thing being a theatre company, and if it gets too comfortable, it doesn’t feel to have its edge any more.
I always liken the making of theatre to the making of a dinner. When you have some friends coming over, when you make them a meal, you want it to be a nice meal. And when you serve it to them you want them to enjoy it.
It looks like you got your affection for improvised theatre spaces from the early days.
Conrad: That was a sense of necessity, and is sort of a sense of necessity, in terms of Claybody’s progression. There is no space for Claybody, so every time we do a show, we need to find a space to put it on. So that’s why there’s a clear echo.
But, having said that, what’s lovely about it is a place like the Dipping House has got all that magic, and there’s a sense you can go in there and plan what you might have to do. I didn’t think, but I do now, the idea of going into a building and switch on the lights and have conversations about what might happen is a wonderful privilege. Because if you “pop up” (and we don’t pop up, pop ups are like a blanket and two sheets I guess), you bring all of the whole team, you bring all of the whole team. So seat installation, light installation, it’s not a pop-up over half an hour.
So it means we need to move a lot of things out of the way in order to “pop up”. So it’s great to have a space where we can actually plan, and think about how might might timetable and work in partnership with others to develop it, and we’ve not had that before,. and it’s a real privilege.
Deborah: And it’s sort of what happened to Broadsides, ended up in the Viaduct, under the mill in Dean Clough, and that became their home, and that was rougher than this in the early days.
Conrad: There’s a core difference between the Broadsides model and this, in that Broadsides was set up as a touring model, and even though it had a home in Dean Clough in Halifax, ostensibly 95% of the work was elsewhere in the country, and get a lot of following of course developing that touring model. We ended up working the the Vic, which is down the road, and co-producing with the [New] Vic, and directing freelance, stuff like that.
But it was a touring model, whereas Claybody is created because of the place we are in. So at its heart, the inspiration is different. Not parochial, I don’t mean we can only look inward – it’s not just stories that look in, it’s inspired from and can look out. And right now, that’s completely different from the old Broadsides model that toured round.
Deborah: And also, Broadsides was classic extant texts, great plays by Shakespeare and Greeks and so forth, whereas Claybody from its first oft was a new writing company. There are massive differences, but the connection I think is 1) the use of found space, and 2) what Con and I learned from Barrie Rutter, which was about connection to the audience, being accessible to the audience, about shaking their hand as they come in, which was a great asset of Broadsides. The audience really felt connect to Barrie’s company.
Conrad: That side of it I think is imperative: communication with the end user.
Deborah: The audience are everything.
Conrad: Right the way from being in the rehearsal room, you’ve got to be thinking: Where are we going with this thing? Who is the ultimate consumer of this thing? Who’s going to connect to it? You can’t just lock the door on the rehearsal room and go “aren’t we good?” You can be rigorous, you can be inventive, you can be energetic in that room, not lose any of that, but you can keep contact with who’s going to have it. And at the end of the day when you shake the hand of the man or woman who’s been in, that’s still the most gratifying thing. Particularly as a director, you go: “Hey, look what we did there, how they’ve connected to it.” And that’s imperative.
Deborah: I always liken the making of theatre to the making of a dinner. When you have some friends coming over, when you make them a meal, you want it to be a nice meal. And when you serve it to them you want them to enjoy it. Great pleasure in seeing people enjoy the food you made, isn’t it? We can all connect and understand that principle. And it’s exactly the same with theatre: we want to make something the audience can like and enjoy.
I get accused quite often that my plays are sad and make people cry – but I don’t think that’s presented to me as a negative. It’s more about being moved, and they like that. They don’t mind being moves as long as it has meaning. So that’s the great pleasure of it. And being able to speak to them if they don’t like it as well!
Conrad: There’s a community the grew up around Broadsides because – I think Barrie would agree – it spoke to the audience in a way they’d not been spoken to before. And they thought that was representing their voice. That’s was given to Broadsides, by the people who came to watch it. They went “Ah, you’re doing this!” And so there was a community the followed and built up around the country.
Again, we a have a slightly different model again because of being based here. We have a community who keep returning and growing. We also have a literal community in a community company, who often get participatory roles in the shows that we do. Obviously with Broadsides as a touring company that’s almost impossible to do, a model like that. We’ve grown a community, grown an education side, as well as developing the main strand of the companies work – that wouldn’t exist if the company wasn’t creating the main body of the work. And that’s how it’s inspired: from the centre, outwards. So we’re connected in every way to all the work we’re doing, which is another imperative.
Another small parallel with Northern Broadsides: If you ask Barrie Rutter why he founded the company, he always used to say “I wanted to do one play, I had one idea, I wanted to do Richard.” And when he put Richard III in front of an audience, with him as Richard and all Northern actors in their native voices … he couldn’t walk away from it, he made it!
You mentioned that Northern Broadsides was a classic set texts company to start with – and it still mostly is. But your productions you did them were new or semi-new. But crucially it was made more accessible. So what was the origin story?
Conrad: We started with The Bells. I fancied doing melodrama. I love the classical drama in terms of Shakespeare and stuff, but also more physically based performance style. And so what we were are able to do in the umbrella of Broadsides is develop the canon of work. We could still do Shakespeare, but we could branch out. The first thing I stepped up to do was an adaptation of The Bells.
What year was that?
Deborah: 2004.
That’s four years before Accidental Death of an Anarchist, I think.
Conrad: That’s right. So that then had progression to all of those. And things like Dario Fo and those clowning shows, I love all of that. I love the integration of music in pieces. So we had a different sense of epic about them, I guess. You know, Cyrano and all of those big cast pieces. The musicality become embedded I guess within shows I was doing as a director then. Because I started off as an actor, then started writing music, then started directing. So there was a progression in that sense.
And then we had a look a widening the repertoire, which Barrie was keen on as well. And Tony Harrison is a classicist who wrote new plays. Where everybody met in terms of the journey of Broadsides was at the National doing Tony Harrison’s Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. So they were new plays, but with classical text and that language.
Deborah: And Barrie was developing two strands of work really, and some of it crossed over. I had a play developing called Vacuum in 2005, round that time. It was with a script development organisation, and they wanted to develop it, by which time Conrad had read it. It was a very peculiar little two-hander, and Con was interested in it and said “I would like to have a look at this”. So with the other organisation I developed another play which became Flamingoland, which was actually produced as the new Vic Theatre, separate from Broadsides.
There was some new work then starting to happen, then the classic foreign language play thing shifted again from The Bells (which was originally a French play that became an English melodrama), to classic contemporary foreign language, which is Dario Fo, then moving on to Gogol. And Con wanted to do The Government Inspector, and I’d ALWAYS wanted to do The Government Inspector, because I had a bit of a handle on it because my father worked in local government. And I’d seen a number of adaptations of it, and what they always seem to do, which was perfectly legitimate, was left it in Russia. I’ve not seen an adaptation of The Government Inspector that has not got all the Russian names in. Just like Accidental Death, it left in Milan. Bring it here, and you get added value. So that was the approach. And with The Government Inspector, Con really wanted a brass band at the centre of it. And I fancied it being a small town in the Pennines, in that sort of brass bandy area of Huddersfield and Saddleworth.
There’s a little niche interest from Durham here, so [legally actionable anecdotes regarding Durham City Council in the early 2000s redacted – Chris] and when I first heard of The Government Inspector I thought “I want to do this in Durham”. I’m surprised no-one apart from us seems to have had that idea. It seems like such an obvious one.
Conrad: Absolutely.
Deborah: And I think that’s why that play gets returned to, constantly.
Conrad: It’s so pressing, all the time.
Deborah: It’s about small government corruption, local government corruption.
When the crossover happened, it was the right time to do something else. The company was changing. Alongside Barrie, we helped to run the company over those years with Sue Andrews. There was a core staff of about three or four of us, and it just felt like a family business. So it should move on.
Conrad: And similarly, Accidental Death of a Anarchist and Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay are about corruptive elements of society. They’re good to write about, and they’re screaming out for satire.
Deborah: Our Accidental Death was done 16 years ago, and there’s just been a really big version of it which has done very well [By Tom Basen, the Crucible Sheffield], following on from all the corruption scandal about the Met Police.
Conrad: We had the anarchist in ours with Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian who was shot on the underground. And actually there was one version we wanted to do that was set around Hillsborough with the disaster there and the inquest on there. because we wanted to see if we could do it in Sheffield. We never quite got that on there.
Deborah: The cock-up/cover-up is what Accidental Death is about.
I always thought that with Hillsborough, the mistakes were no worse than the Bradford City Fire, but because the pivotal mistake was the Police, they knew there’d be hell to pay, so they covered it up and made it worse.
Deborah: It’s what happens in Accidental Death. They have killed a man, but then the cover-up is even worse.
Conrad: It makes great drama.
Deborah: That’s how it works. And then somebody who saw Accidental Death said “Have you ever read The Suicide?” So then we looked at The Suicide, again another Russian. And that was one we really liked the look of, and thought “Oh yes, we can do this, give it the folksy treatment”. And then Cyrano.
Conrad: French play. Sweeping, romantic, big heart. Wonderful themes, something you can get joy from and cry at.
Deborah: And in the meantime, Barrie then commissioned An August Bank Holiday Lark, which sits, in the middle of these, in 2014, ten years ago! And that was a big show for all of us, really, and that was a new play. And it won “Best New Play”. [UK Theatre Awards, 2014 – Chris] And it’s the high point really of all those years.
And obviously we carried on and Con held the fort for a little while, and then stepped back and just let Broadsides sail away. That time had come to pass it on and move away. Because around the same time An August Bank Holiday Lark had been written, I’d written this other play called Ugly Duck about Stoke, and all set in Stoke, about Stoke characters, reflecting I was observing around me as being the experience of the city. And obviously, it’s very difficult to get anyone to do a play about Stoke. And so a few people had read it and really believed in the play and I’d developed it through a new writing organisation in Birmingham. And a few people said “Look let’s get it on ourselves, you build it.” So I applied, just as an individual, for some funding, to do that play, to do that play, and that was it.
And another small parallel with Northern Broadsides: If you ask Barrie Rutter why he founded the company, he always used to say “I wanted to do one play, I had one idea, I wanted to do Richard,” and that’s all he had. And when he put Richard III in front of an audience, with him as Richard and all Northern actors in their native voices, it landed with such power and resonated with audiences so much, he couldn’t walk away from it, he made it!
And a similar thing happens with Ugly Duck. We put this play in front of audiences in Burslem in the school of art in a found space. And Nobody thought anybody would come. The holy trinity of things not to do: a new play in a non-theatre space in Stoke-on-Tent. Nobody will come, theatres across the country outright don’t do new plays. And people came.
Conrad: They, and they sold out, and they continue to come, so the idea of doing a new play and not generating an audience is obviously …
Deborah: Not true.
Conrad: All the time when you CAN make new work and people DO come. And you can sell out doing work …
Deborah: But it’s a matter of trust, it’s about building it. We did it in Burslem, and because it had been developed through the Capital Theatre Festival in Birmingham it went to Birmingham as well. And that was it, that was the end of it. Not many performances, and so I think four hundred people saw it in Stoke, because that was our capacity, we couldn’t do any more than that. And now …
Conrad: We can get two and a half thousand people to see a show. When we did the co-production with the Vic recently we had seven thousand people through the door. I’m really pleased I’m able to say that.
Deborah: And what gave us a boost as well was that Ugly Duck was such a success in 2013 that the new Vic remounted it in 2014. So there have been two productions of Claybody’s that have gone to the New Vic: one was the first one, and one was The Card.
We didn’t sit down ten years ago and go “Let’s found a theatre company!” That did not happen. We said “Let’s put a play on”, and we did, and we just followed that then as people were asking and responding.
I hadn’t realised this was you: there was also Anna of the Five Towns. Just for the benefit of my readership who are mostly not from Stoke, can you please explain the controversy over the “Five Towns” and the “Six Towns”?
Deborah: I shall take that one. Anna of the Five Towns wasn’t a Claybody production, it was a New Vic production, and Con and I were employed as freelancers to make that show, and it was the anniversary of the author Arnold Bennett. Arnold Bennett was born in Stoke-on-Trent in Hanley on Hope Street and he did good – the boy done good. He became VERY successful, and very wealthy, a very prolific writer.
And a lot of his work – not all of his best work but a lot of it – in a fictionalised Potteries. And at the time he was writing, the City of Stoke-on-Trent did not exist. Stoke-on-Trent was six towns, but lots of bits of six towns, which are north to south in a line: Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton. And they were federated, as a federation of towns, in 1910, and in 1925, those six towns were granted city status, and it became the City of Stoke-on-Trent. So we’ve got 100 years next year of the City of Stoke-on-Trent.
But Bennett, understandably, thought “six” was a bit of a flappy number, and thought five was a good fist of towns. Five just felt better. So when he started to fictionalise the city, with slightly different names for the towns – so Burslem becomes Bursley, Hanley becomes Hanbridge, you know where you are – he missed out Fenton. It’s clear which town.
So there was a frustration because the doyen of the city had pooped on his own town. And Fentonians weren’t too pleased about it. And the irony is when we did The Card, we did it in Fenton Town Hall.
Was it a coincidence or trying to make up?
Deborah: A bit of both. It felt good, and it felt a sort of poetic justice to put it on. And I like to think we converted a number of Fentonians to Bennett. The thing you need to understand about Stoke is it’s very tribal. People belong to their town, and they are very loyal to their town. As outsiders, we are quite promiscuous, we move through the towns, I like them all, and I like the different characters of all of them, the different feel each town has, it’s got its own beauty spots, and it’s got its own dark shadows and dark spaces. And we’ve got amazing parks in the six towns, it’s seven really, Burslem’s kind of got two. But it’s obviously not built for roads, it’s hilly.
Conrad: It’s a unique city.
Deborah: So to return to your question, Arnold Bennett upset people in Fenton when he decided five was a more nice literary number than six. And that’s what it is, he didn’t hate Fenton, he just made it five, and there are the Five Towns novels, of which The Card is one, the Clayhanger novels, they’re all set in the fictional version. Bennett was still alive in 1925 so he did Stoke become a city. All of his Five Towns books were written prior to that.
Always the work is in response to something. … The reason The Card felt like the right show for 2022 was because it was fun. And because Denry Manchin, the main character, is identified with the cause of cheering us all up.
From an outsider’s perspective, everyone assumed when Barrie Rutter stepped down, you would be taking over Northern Broadsides. From what you were saying, it sounds like you’d already decided you were going to leave shortly after.
Conrad: I think when the crossover happened, it was the right time to do something else. The company was changing. Alongside Barrie, we helped to run the company over those years with Sue Andrews. There was a core staff of about three or four of us, and it just felt like a family business. So it should move on.
And part of the segue was that we’d already started this company here in 2013. It was like two musical hairpins. One was coming to an end, and the other, for us, was starting to …
Deborah: Expand and grow.
Conrad: And that was a nice passover, because we could look back with enthusiasm. Back in 2019, That’s part of the reason me and Debs did and Barrie directed Much Ado About Nothing, to return ot that in the end. It was like a circular journey, and we closed it off, ready to move on. And it felt dead right to do that, and then have this lovely segue into something else that was being created at the same time.
Deborah: It genuinely was, because although Claybody began in 2013, we didn’t really get regular substantial funding till 2017 really, when Dirty Laundry, that kicked us off really. We were in Spode then, and we were doing stuff here, and then we got successive funding. So just as Barrie was stepping back at the point at Broadsides, this company was starting to grow. Conrad and Barrie were signature work there at the company, and it felt like the right moment. We were a caretaker for about 18 months really.
Conrad: When it carried on for 12 months, or whatever it was, it was a temporary thing to make the next segue to whoever they might have been.
Deborah: And when Broadsides got to the point of advertising for a new artistic director, and putting it out to tender, that’s the point when Conrad said “Right, I won’t apply” and stepped back.
Conrad: That was the segue to baton pass. The board had changed, certain elements had changed. Yeah, we’d done our bit.
Deborah: And in some ways – we think about this with Claybody as well as we look forward, thinking about legacy, thinking about what happens – it’s okay to let go. There will come a time when we say to our board “We’re now ready to step back, do you want to continue the company with new artistic leadership?”
Conrad: Companies have changed, arts funding has changed, the whole landscape is completely different. At it happens – certainly from 2017 – even at the beginning we weren’t aligning up to do “Let’s Create”, we were sort of doing “Let’s Create”. So in some ways that segue was good, because we found ourselves doing what they wanted.
Deborah: And the idea as well of “placemaking”. And we’d reached the point as well in our lives and careers where we were very settled in this area. We came in 2001 with our daughter, who’s now grown and flown, so we were content in that way, and looking to put something back, to blook where we’re planted. We don’t want to move on.
Conrad: After twenty-five years of touring the country – it’s fine, not to tour. It’s fine to go: “Can we go home?” and try something on our own patch.
Deborah: We didn’t sit down ten years ago and go “Let’s found a theatre company!” That did not happen. We said “Let’s put a play on”, and we did, and we just followed that then as people were asking and responding. Now, several times a month, somebody will tell me “Oooh, you should write a play about …” and give me a subject or a story or a character or a person they’ve heard of. There’s plenty of material here to keep everyone busy.
At the time it looked like it may have been a gamble, but then came the co-production to The Card. This was as big as the Northern Broadsides productions, which was the biggest sign that the gamble had paid off. I thought there were three strands to this: your leadership, the community company, and the brass band.
Conrad: Yes, but even before we did The Card – for example, when we did Dirty Laundry here, it was a pro cast of six, wasn’t it?
Deborah: Five.
Conrad: Five, was it? It has an extended cast of probably thirty. So even before that – what we were used to with Broadsides anyway is the idea of large casts. We almost always did large casts.
[At this point, the interview was interrupted by the arrival of the Chair of the Board of Trustees, who’d come to drop off a few things. Deborah gave her a hand whilst Conrad continued.]
Conrad: So we were used to those big setting plays, and we were augmenting it, and community played a large part of it. When we first did The Card in Fenton, we had seven pro actors in, a brass brand. That wasn’t a co-production, we produced that, and all told it had forty people in it.
Deborah: It had more [than the New Vic production]. It had children in it.
Conrad: Obviously the difference is – we had a bit of national traction because of the profile of Broadsides and Deb doing various things about playwriting – we were able to bring some of that with us, and also bring some support from Yorkshire folk and further afield who then came down to see Claybody. So you would find people going “Where can I stay because we’re coming down from Yorkshire?” And people from the Vic obviously, and people who’d never seen the show before.
I think, obviously, Stoke-on-Trent and the surrounding area is a challenged and challenging place … But it was a bit like Shakespeare, you’ve got to dig a bit, you’ve got to work a bit harder, but it’s like buried treasure, and when you’ve done that bit of extra work, the rewards are massive.
I think I was one of those. My niece’s birthday was around the time and I thought “Ooh, this looks I could do a very intricate journey plan.”
Conrad: That’s a really wonderful thing, isn’t it? People travel down to see it. I’m grateful for that, and people who’ve stayed supporting in lots and lots of different ways.
So we were all ready when we produced The Card. To be honest, we did that in three weeks, with a brass band and forty people, seven pros in it. It was that point I went over to Deb and said I think we’ve taken on …
Both: Too much.
Conrad: Because we were doing that in three weeks and opening on the Wednesday of the fourth week. It was MASSIVE!
Deborah: And the budget was tiny, relatively. And the costume designer, Dawn, was doing her head in.
Conrad: And it was great. When everyone pulls together, in the right way, and get on. And so, doing the co-production with the Vic, obviously there was much more facility to it.
Deborah: I mean, for one thing, Chris, I wasn’t doing the washing. Because when we do our shows, we can’t afford a laundry person.
Conrad: It’s everything, it’s all the facilities. It’s always a relief, when you go to a theatre such as that, because you’ve got all of those departments. We still had Dawn, we had pretty much exactly the same team, and in actual fact we were able to offer the assistant director, who we’d given the opportunity to come in (we did pay him a bit in the end) because we didn’t have it in the budget. And a young actor who wanted to come and observe, and eventually we worked her into the show.
So when we went to the think we were able to get Nick paid and get Isobel paid. So the pro cast went to eight and we had an assistant director on it, and still thirty. The brass band, who I’d met doing Brassed Off at the Vic, and they’ve become dead good friends, brilliant, the Acceler8 band.
So it’s been a natural progression, but of course the extra facility and energy of The Vic are a wonderful thing. We’re lucky to have a lot of supporters who want us to do really well, and that includes journalists, who came to see this journey. But we’ve taken the experience of Broadsides, throughout the years, of putting large shows on, so it’s not unusual to do it.
In fact, The Card was the first one where we really integrated live music. We’ve been doing live music with Broadsides …
Deborah: … but it’s the first time we did it with Claybody, and then Song of the Sytch, which was here, we had live music in again – we had a choir.
Conrad: We love the integration of live music, but hitherto, only one play demanded it, and it takes extra facility.
Deborah: And also, we’re growing, and learning, and responding. And always the work is in response to something. The Card was one we quite fancied doing anyway, but the reason The Card felt like the right show for 2022 was because it was fun. And because Denry Manchin, the main character, is identified with the cause of cheering us all up. We’d just come out of the horrific pandemic, a terrible time, what we didn’t want was to put something really miserable and difficult in front of people. Because what people actually needed was joy, and fun, and music, and laughter.
Conrad: It was a good time for that play. And during the pandemic, even though we were obviously freelancing, we created with emergency funding a large radio drama with 20-odd people in. Two directors, five writers on it, we created a choral piece with the community, so we were still creating large pieces.
Deborah: And in 2021 we came out of the pandemic with an expanded developed version of the Greenwood Dream piece that we did online, called The Silver Arrow, which we then performed at Stoke Minster, with mixed professional musicians and a community voluntary choir.
Conrad: So the augmentation with The Vic is great, because we love working with The Vic, we’ve done freelancing with The Vic and broadsides, so that’s the connection to it. But the truth is it was sort of going there anyway – there have been very big shows. The D Road and Hot Lane must have had forty people in. We had pro actors again, but the opening sequence had a dance hall with loads of people dancing.
Deborah: The Card was another shift as well. Previously our community company element had been world-building and immersion and the start of the experience, and that happened because the idea for Dirty Laundry is that it would actually be a show that provoke debate, about the environment, about public health and industry. And so, what we wanted to do, we soften the audience up in a way, by the time they encountered the way, the felt they’d been immersed. A little bit like a Disney Dark Ride, as if they’d left their own world and lives far behind and entered the world of the play. So on arriving at Spode, they want on a journey down a 1950s street, with characters and music, and ended up going through a little door and into the back of a set: a room in somebody’s house, to take their seats. At which point, hopefully you feel like you’ve really gone somewhere, before you meet the characters and meet the story.
We did that again with Hot Lane where the audience entered and they were in a dance hall, which was the inciting incident of the story. And after that, The D Road, where there was a traffic jam in time and space. Our community participants created that world of this chaotic road. Some seventy.
Conrad: There were cars in it.
Deborah: But when we did The Card itself, the company stayed and were in the whole show. So they went right through, and that was the first time we’d done that as well. The Card was a big shift in terms of ambition, but because it felt like the right show for the time, we were confident.
Conrad: And that was the first time we had some actor-musicians plus a brass band.
Deborah: And then we had an MD, so when Rebekah Hughes said “Do you want me to play the show?” we almost wept for joy!
Conrad: Also we worked with Bex for a long time during the Broadsides period and freelance period, we’ve come to be really close to her, and loved the way she’s progressed as an artist and a musician. So that was lovely, that felt like connected, going through.
So yes, it was an upscaling, but it had already been upscaled.
Deborah: Everything felt like it was the next step, the next step, the next step. Now here we are in the Dipping House. We didn’t anticipate this when we joined the National Portfolio in April – which was again another game-changer for the company. We became a charity, we became an NPO, that’s a very different level of functioning. In that National Portfolio plan, we didn’t have “take over a space, run a building”, but here we are, so now we’re trying to factor that into everything that we’re doing.
[I make a quip about whether they’ve been reading my questions upside down, because they’ve answered a lot of my questions before I’d asked them.]
You’ve told me a lot about The Dipping House. What have you got coming up here?
Deborah: We’re developing it. So we did our show here in the autumn, which was called Song of the Sytch. And then we’ve done one event so far, which was just in the New Year, which was a Wassail event, which was music and readings and a bar.
And did I see a sign for “Hootenanna”?
Deborah: Yes! Now Hootenanna is a digital project for New Year’s Eve this year, which seems like a long way off in January. There’s a long of build-up because it’s a lot of community work and engagement, to make this piece of work with the community. There may be some event happening here, something might happen in the Dipping House.
But the autumn show will be here. It’s not written yet, but I’m already working with communities up in a part of the city called Bentilee, which at one point was the largest council estate in Europe. And in 1967, a lot of people saw a UFO, over the fields at the edge of Bentilee Estate.And there’s some archive footage online of people talking about it. Quite a while we’ve wanted to make a show about that. That’s far this year, and it feels again like the right time for the Bentilee show, which has been in the works since before the pandemic, when we saw this thing about UFO sightings. what does this mean? How do we tell a story about a community with that as a kicking off point? It’s really pregnant with story and interest. And that will be here in the autumn.
And in the meantime, we’re programming a series of live events. We’ve got some ideas for different concerts and audiences.
Conrad: We’ve got people booked in to do single gigs, and we’ll be doing workshops here, theatre craft workshops with the community. Things that we don’t know yet is exciting, because people come up to us all the time going “Can we have a look at this and this?”
Deborah: So somebody phoned me up the other say and said “Can I talk to you about your venue?” Because now people know we’ve got it, and now we’re investing in it, trying to make it a bit more comfortable and user-friendly. There’s no disabled toilets, there’s only two toilets, it needs more heating.
Conrad: We’ve got people coming here going to do some script development on new plays, and lots of different things, so it should be a little cultural hub. That’s the idea of it.
Deborah: We’re driving it in terms of what we want to put on here, but also we welcome people approaching us, because we’ve got a space! And it’s a privilege to have a space. And we’ll make it as user-friendly and affordable as we possibly can.
Conrad: The Hootenanna thing is an all-year project. And we’re working with film companies on top, and digital animation companies on the side.
Deborah: And the focus on that will be around the grandmothers, the nannas of the city. That’s another Stokie thing. So my grandma’s “grandma”, but our daughter and their cousins called their grandmother “nan”. Some people say “nanny”, some people say “nanna”, round here, it’s “nanna”, with a long “a” on it, so hence “Hootenanna”, rather than “Hootenanny” which is Jools Holland’s New Year’s Eve show.
And what we find is that wherever we go in the city – particularly some of the projects were working on now and communities – it’s women of a certain age, women who are grandmothers probably, or certainly of that generation, and that stretches from forty to ninety. Grandmas aren’t necessarily little old ladies that knit. Some of them are, but lots of them aren’t, and there’s some very young dynamic grandmothers in the city who are really holding their communities together making a difference. They’re the glue that binds us. So we thought we’d celebrate them, celebrate the city. Look the future, the next hundred years, all in one hour on New Year’s Eve.
Conrad: Obviously, you imagine that is quite a full-on project right the way through the year …
Deborah: Because we want to create it with people. We could probably do it all in three months.
Conrad: We’ll be working with BBC Radio Stoke who’s going to be doing producing techniques, we’re trying to develop some film-makers, we’re looking at Marty Tideswell from Staffs University, who’s the ex-Editor in Chief of the local paper the Sentinel.
Deborah: But again, as we don’t know who we’re going to meet, in the community, it’s always a bit unknown, you’ve got to trust that if you build it, they will come. You’ll set something up, and people with amazing stories, and the potential to learn and grow within your project will appear. And they always do.
You’ve spoken about all the projects you’re doing locally. For your wider fanbase outside of Stoke, would you ever consider touring stuff outside of Stoke again?
Conrad: The answer is yes, if there’s something pertinent to take elsewhere. So it’s not about cutting off the audience outside. We’re getting back to Halifax quite regularly. Sarah, who runs the Viaduct Theatre, has been down a couple of times and has said “Why don’t you bring something here?” And if we find something suitable are travellable, then that’s good, but it’s not the inspiration right now.
Deborah: I think the thing is that touring is really difficult right now. The economic environment out there is pretty difficult anyway. But co-productions or shared work, that’s more likely to travel us, if we can find a partner to work with in another part of the country.
Conrad: To be honest, some of the work we do in terms of size and scale is suitable for touring. But obviously if it had community involvement that make it much more complex to do. We do lot of different types of drama, but I guess we’ve got the experience to create shows of a particular size, that particularly fits that Broadsides model, which is the mid scale / large scale touring thing, and there’s a dearth of things that are touring at the moment. But we’re not driving it to that, we’ll see if that opportunity comes up, or we talk to the Arts Council and they say “we can help you fund that”. Because it’s often a loss leader, touring, because there’s no guarantee of audience. You can’t just bung an 8-hander on tour and take a loss every single week. So you’ve got to be really careful with the economics of touring.
Right now, I love welcoming those faces from further afield. I’m thinking “Come to Stoke-on-Trent for a couple of days, if you can. We’ll welcome you here, you’ll get a good pint of ale here, you’ll see a bit of the Potteries …”
Deborah: I think, obviously, Stoke-on-Trent and the surrounding area is a challenged and challenging place. So are lots of other places, and you’ve got to work harder. I remember when I first got here trying to work it all out. But it was a bit like Shakespeare, you’ve got to dig a bit, you’ve got to work a bit harder, but it’s like buried treasure, and when you’ve done that bit of extra work, the rewards are massive. And I think that’s very true of the City of Stoke-on-Trent. You have got to work harder because it’s more difficult to understand than any other city of a comparable size, like Derby or Leicester or Nottingham.
Conrad: It isn’t difficult to understand, it’s drama, it’s people, and drama’s just about people. And that’s why making a drama here can travel anywhere. It doesn’t matter if it’s Stoke, or London. If the narrative’s strong, we want to listen to it. And I guess that’s why …
Deborah: … people from outside of Stoke come here. Obviously there are some local references which absolutely delight local audiences, because they don’t see themselves or hear themselves represented in that way. But it’s not exclusive, it’s not a barrier to anyone else, because if I went to see a show that was about London, I wouldn’t necessarily get all the references, but people assume a street in London can be named and nobody will go “Ooh, I’ve been there!”, because you hear it all the time. What I’d like is that people are more blase about hearing names of Stoke-on-Trent places in a play, and it’s not such an unusual thing.
The last one: You’ve been speaking very fondly of Stoke-on-Trent. Give you pitch for why people should come to Stoke (and catch you as well if you’re there)?
Deborah: Stoke’s a fascinating city with amazing heritage, and there’s lots of lovely places to visit, so it’s a good place to come and visit anyway. It’s cheap, it’s not an expensive place to visit, you can get a pint for a reasonable amount, there’s some good pubs, but there’s plenty of culture here as well. There are theatres, there’s galleries, there’s museums, there’s lots of amazing thing to see. And especially Claybody Theatre, at the Dipping House, on Spode Works, in Stoke, just round the corner from the station, which you know yourself as you’ve walked from the station to her in ten minutes. And it’s growing, and it’s coming on, there’s going to be some exciting things happening in the next few years here. Come and see us!
Conrad and Deborah, thank you very much.
Chris Neville-Smith's blog on theatre 