Interview with Deborah McAndrew and Conrad Nelson on Claybody Theatre

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.

Interview with Julian Caddy on Brighton Fringe, past and future.

Brighton Fringe 2023 has just ended, and there are two things that have defined this festival. The first is the arrival of Caravanserai, a pop-up venue used at Bestival now also functioning as a replacement to The Warren – which, to some controversy, is run by Brighton Fringe itself rather than an independent venue. The second defining feature is that this was the last Brighton Fringe with Julian Caddy as chief executive. Next year, he’ll be running the brand new Scarborough Fair in North Yorkshire.

There can be little doubt over the influence Julian Caddy has had on Brighton Fringe. Under his leadership, Brighton Fringe has grown from a low-key event to a bigger high-profile event comparable to Edinburgh Fringe 30 years ago. But there was also the unexpected crisis of Coronavirus, which we now know could have been far more catastrophic for Brighton than it was.

To answer all of these questions about Brighton Fringe, Coronavirus, Caravanserai, Scarborough Fair, and much, much more, I am delighted to announce we can hear it from the man himself. Over an hour, we covered lots of ground, and here’s what he had to say.

I think the role of Brighton Fringe as the organisation is to make Brighton Fringe useful. It’s a pay-to-play model, it’s unfunded, 99% of people taking part in a fringe have little to no funding, they’re paying their way, it’s a passion project, it’s a piece of new writing, it’s a thing they believe in. So a fringe needs to be useful in delivering audiences, it needs to be useful in delivering reviews and reviewers, it needs to be delivering touring opportunities. And that, I think is crucial.

I am here with my biggest interview feature to date. I have here with me here Julian Caddy, who is Chief Executive of Brighton Fringe in what is – as it turns out – his last Brighton Fringe as Chief Executive. Julian, welcome.

Thank you for having me.

So, let’s start at the beginning. How do you become Chief Executive of Brighton Fringe?

I was, for a number of years, running venues up in Edinburgh. I was one of the founders of the original Sweet Venues in 2003; before then I was producing, acting, directing – what a lot of people do – since 1996. And it was something that popped up – I didn’t really see myself as running a whole festival. But I was curious, and I knew Holly who was running Brighton Fringe at the time with Nick Stockman. And I came down, and I was of of the producers of a show at the Brunswick in 2009 with Le Navet Bete, a company now based in Exeter. That was my first Brighton Fringe experience, and I was curious about setting up a Sweet Venue in Brighton. So I got to know Brighton as well. And when the job came up, I thought “Yeah, I’ll give it a go.”

And then I didn’t get it. That was the first time they put it out, and they didn’t even interview me, so I was curious about all of that, but then moved on. And then I was emailed on 2011 to say that the person who got the job didn’t stay long and would I be interested, so I went through an interview process. Which is interesting because that’s how it worked – or not quite how it worked – for Scarborough, where I was contacted saying the last person didn’t want it, would you like it, so maybe I’m a second choice person! But a loyal one.

Interview with Nicky Haydn on The Warren Outdoors

Credit Simon Dack / Alamy Live News

Skip to review of West End On Sea.

Last month, I was invited to the launch of what is possibly the most ambitious venture in live performance since lockdown. The Warren, normally Brighton Fringe’s biggest venue, went ahead and created its own outdoor pop-up venue with socially distanced seating. I was impressed by what I saw, and, more importantly, it’s been getting the audiences it needed – something that was far from certain at launch.

But there was something that puzzled me – how was it possible to put together something of this complexity with less than a month’s notice that outdoor theatre performances were permitted? To answer this, and other questions on The Warren in general, I took advantage of a train/cycle holiday along the south coast to catch up with Nicky Haydn, artistic director of Otherplace, to hear more about this extraordinary story.

I literally don’t know when we decided to do this … It all began with a “what if?” What if we were able to create something outdoors? We had no idea if it could become a reality.

Interview with Stephen Walker: Buxton Fringe, now and beyond

It’s time for another interview. This was something I’d been planning to do for months: ask the new chair of Buxton Fringe about his plans for the future. But in those said months, more event happened than anyone could have thought possible. But that’s okay, because this made an interview all the more interesting.

It’s a much longer interview than usual, but we did have a lot to get through. I bring you an inside account of the most extraordinary year from the festival fringes.

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I have with me Stephen Walker, the chair of Buxton Fringe. This is an interview in his capacity as chair, although we will be digressing into his past role as a reviewer.

Good to see you Chris.

If we can cast our minds back to a period in the dim and distant past called November 2019, when Buxton Fringe helds its AGM. What were your original plans back then?

When I took over as chair, I didn’t feel the need for massive changes. I’ve never been a fan of the management style that says “I’m new, I need to change everything” just for the sake of it. The fringe work pretty well, I felt it was more just getting my feet under the table.

We’ve a few new people on the committee, so I thought we’d have a steady year – we’ve had our 40th anniversary, so it would be really nice to make sure everything works and that I know what I’m doing. It’s keeping the show on the road, more like being a custodian of the Fringe. The fringe runs itself to a large extent; because we don’t select or censor, the fringe will be whatever it’s going to be.

The last couple of weeks in June there were just so many entries coming in … and other people were putting stuff together specifically for us, which was fantastic.

Interview with Hetty Hodgson on Beats and directing

Last summer I recommended Yen at the Edinburgh Fringe. As director Hetty Hodgson has previously twice hired the City Theatre which I’m a trustee of, I couldn’t include this in the reviews, but I nevertheless raved about this as much as I could short of the review. All four of her productions I’ve seen (three at Durham and one at Edinburgh) have impressed me, so with her fifth and final production within Durham Student Theatre coming up, I caught up with Hetty to talk about this latest play, here experiences of Edinburgh, and more.

If we start with what’s coming up next week, tell us all about the play.

It’s a play called Beats, it was written by Kieran Hurley, and performed first in 2012 at the Edinburgh Fringe then it went on to London for a bit. So it’s a play about a boy, fifteen years old, when rave culture was banned in 1994, and it’s all about youth solidarity and the power of the youth and quite interesting and really cool because it’s a one-man show.

We’re performing it in Wiff Waff, in one of Durham’s nightclubs, so that’s a bit different, it’s a bit more immersive, it’s site-specific in some ways, and it’s got live video and visuals throughout, and also a live DJ, so I guess it’s more of a multimedia show than anything else I’ve ever done. And it’s been really interesting, both in creating work with an actor, but also a huge focus of it is the music and the video because that’s something that’s consuming throughout – that’s been really fun to work with.

Interview with Richard Stamp on fringe ethics

I’ve been covering a lot of thorny issue on this blog recently, particularly regarding how fair festival fringes are. But I’ve been giving my own views quite enough. I’m keen to get other perspective on the issues I’ve been covering. So last weekend, I took the opportunity to get the views of the editor of FringeGuru.

This interview is a near-verbatim transcript of what we discussed. But I genuinely had no idea where this would go. And was an interesting discussion it was:

The expansion of Brighton Fringe is the most dramatic change to the fringe scene in the last few years. It’s now said by some that Brighton Fringe now is comparable to the Edinburgh Fringe thirty years ago. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, I wasn’t at the Edinburgh Fringe thirty years ago so it’s hard to draw a comparison, but I do think Brighton Fringe as it has expanded has lost a bit of its individual character. It used to be a place where local performances and local performers were very much at the fore, with some invited guests. Now the balance has shifted and it’s about shows visiting the city, with local companies forming just a small part of the programme.

I think that is a shame, but on the other hand, I do think there’s a need for a counterbalance to Edinburgh. It really makes very little sense for the Edinburgh Fringe to carry on growing any further – I think everybody recognises that – and Brighton has its own place on the festival circuit that it occupies well.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether I think it’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s going to happen, and the question we should be asking ourselves is how we try to nudge it gently in a more fair and ethical direction, rather than trying to stop an unstoppable force.

Interview with Jake Murray: on Jesus Hopped the A Train and Eylsium Theatre

A completely new feature for this blog: I have an interview. Next week, Jesus Hopped the A Train begins in Durham and continues in Manchester, but what is most notable is the theatre company behind it. It has been ages since Durham has had a theatre company based in the city at professional level, and there are a lot of plans for the future. I caught up with Jake Murray after a rehearsal to ask about the play and beyond.

Fine print: This was a proper interview and not just a series of questions for an interviewee to fill in. This was recorded, types up, and a few minor edits were made to read better, but I didn’t need to make many changes and this is near-verbatim. The broad structure of the interview was agreed in advance. At some point I was probably write up the rules properly, but in the meantime, this is this as more David Frost than Jeremy Paxman.

I have with me Jake Murray of Elysium Theatre, who has just completed a rehearsal of Jesus Hopped the A Train, which is coming to the Assembly Rooms on Monday. We’ll be talking about this in the moment, but if we start from the beginning, Jake, bring us up to date of Theatre Elysium and what it has done so far.

Elysium Theatre Company is a company I set up with an actor friend, Danny Solomon. Basically, I came up to Durham a year or so ago, because I fell in love and got married and decided I wanted to bring theatre to the north, and the first person I spoke to was my Danny Solomon who lives in my flat in Manchester from my time there. The goal is to bring theatre to Durham and the north-east, but also the wider north, and we seem to be going great guns.

Our first production, Days of Wine and Roses, played at the Assembly Rooms in Durham last and then Theatre 53 two in Manchester, where it got nominated for a Manchester Theatre Award and got great reviews, but up here and over there. And the next play is Jesus Hopped the A Train, which is the northern premiere of an extraodinary play from America. It’s never been seen outside of London, and again we’re playing it at the Assembly Rooms then we’re playing it at Home in Manchester. After that, we’ve got a double-bill of Samuel Beckett plays, which is part of Durham Festival of the Arts, and we’re just in negotiations now for the rights to Jez Butterworth’s The River, which we’re going to be doing in Durham next year, and we’re talking to Durham Student Theatre about doing Miss Julie, also in Durham for 2019. So we’ve got loads in the pipeline.