2016 – the year that the lug went missing

It’s been a very difficult year, one which appears to make the need to find ways to develop conversation about shared values and notions of community more important than ever.

I thought that for my last post of 2016, after writing so much about the work of others, I’d share a small excerpt from one of my own scripts. And I’ve chosen this one because I think it is about an issue that is going to continue to impact on the political discourse over the next twelve months and beyond – the disconnect, the bewilderment, and the anger that is felt and increasingly heard in the conflict between a globalised economy and a sense of the local.

It comes from A Lifetime Guarantee which Hanby and Barrett (before we became Excavate) created in 2012 for the University of Nottingham who were interested in exploring the history of the Raleigh factory, one of Nottinghan’s most iconic industries, given that their Jubilee Campus was built on part of the old factory site.

This was a touring community play that we took to the places where the most Raleigh pension cheques were sent out to. And everywhere we went the place was packed. At the end of the night we would be besieged by people who wanted to share their stories and as a result we carried out more research and developed I Worked At Raleigh – a website with over ten hours of audio interviews from ex workers, along with a smartphone app that is linked to the site and which has been relaunched this year.

See you all in 2017.

Stuart’s father – who is played by the same performer (Robbie) who played Frank Bowden at the beginning of the play – is sat down polishing a lug.

Stuart:           I started at Raleigh in 1997. On weld frame. It wasn’t much of a job to be honest. But I thought that it would please my father; who revered Raleigh, had been there most of his life as a Tool Setter, made bicycles in his shed, and who seemed as he got older to look more and more like Mr Frank Bowden himself.

Father:           Ugly word isn’t it, ‘lug’. But it’s the most beautiful part of a bicycle.

Stuart:           We don’t see them Dad.

Father:           What did you say?

Stuart:           I said we don’t see them. Lugs!

Father:           No.

Stuart:           So is it nearly finished?

Father:           What?

Stuart:           Is it nearly finished? Your latest project?

Father:           It is. Jimmy’s coming over later and we’re going to braze it. You should stay and watch; he’s an artist Stuart, a bloody artist.

Stuart:           I’m off to the football.

Father:           We used to make everything there. Everything.

Stuart:           I know.

Father:           I lost count of the tools I had to make for the hundreds and hundreds of machines in that place.

Stuart:           Yes Dad.

Father:           If it’s not made in Nottingham it’s not a Raleigh.

Stuart:           It is made in Nottingham.

Father:           It’s not is it? It’s put together there.

Stuart:           We do the frames though Dad and you know they’re the most important.

Father:           Everything’s welded.

Stuart:           People don’t want heavy bikes anymore. We’ve just got to do things differently.

Father:           That’s it isn’t it? Make things easier, simpler to use. Get rid of anything that requires time or attention or care or real understanding.

Stuart:           They’re just bicycles dad. And people will always use them for different things.

Father:           What did you say?

Stuart:           Nothing.

Father:           Do you know how to make a frame ring?

Stuart:           You know we don’t do that.

Father:           It was such a lovely sound. Making sure the joints had brazed. Touching it just so on the floor, and hearing that little ring. Like a bell. And if it didn’t; if it made a clunk do you know what we called it?

Stuart:           A dead frame Dad. You’ve told me; a thousand times. And off it went to be rectified.

Father:           I don’t understand it Stuart; I try to but I don’t. How can it make sense to get your gears from the other side of the world rather than from over the road?

Stuart:           Parts have been made in other countries for years you know that.

Father:           The sports field’s gone; Head Office has gone.

Stuart:           But Raleigh is still here Dad. It’s different; but it’s still making bikes.

Father:           I knew this bloke who used to be sent out all over the world for the company. He’d just come back from Kenya where the factory they were starting was next to this lake with this huge flock of flamingos on it. And he told me that wherever in the world he was everyone would ask about the Nottingham factory. Because the Nottingham factory was held in awe. It was Raleigh. The rest were just pretenders.

Stuart:           Not any more.

Father:           You see the thing about a lug is that it’s designed to make sure that everything fits together, just so. That everything slots into place. And the factory had a place Stuart. At the heart of Nottingham. It was where we made things. Where Nottingham made things that were used all over the world. I’d go to London on our trips and me and my workmates would point, every time we saw someone ride past on a Raleigh; ‘look’ we’d say, ‘that’s one of ours – that’s one of bloody ours’. And I felt proud. We all did. Proud of those bicycles.

A speech for the launch of Year of the Artist (2000)

As I’ve been sorting through folders on my laptop I’ve come across a speech I gave at the launch of the Year of the Artist in Nottingham, at the Broadway Cinema in 2000. This scheme followed on reasonably quickly from the launch of the National Lottery and, along with the birth of Creative Partnerships in 2003, was for many artists the moment that they were able to start charging some proper fees for their work.

I was invited, along with Jeanie Finlay and Simon Withers, to give a short talk on the value of the scheme from an artist’s perspective. I wanted to be reasonably provocative and think that it did have some useful things to say, which is why I’ve posted it here.

My project ended up being called Sticking A Pin In, and took the form of a residency at BBC Radio Nottingham. Every week I would appear at the radio station with an ordnance survey map of the county, a blindfold and a pin. Every week someone would ring in and tell me to go right a bit and left a bit and wherever the pin landed would be where I would spend the next week travelling to (by public transport). Before I stuck my pin in I would talk about my findings and play excerpts from the audio recordings I had made with my portable minidisc player on my previous journey . These were then turned into a series of radio monologues called The Village.

Year of the Artist, as this BBC news report states ‘took artists out of seemingly elitist venues such as museums and concert halls, and into football grounds, onto public transport, banks and the workplace’, and reached ‘more than 25 million people’.

The images I used in my presentation – some of which I’ve included here – come from a project called ‘Tales From The Robin Hood Line’ from 1999. This involved me travelling to six ex-mining villages to gather stories and create a series of monologues which used digitally manipulated slides (created by Carol Green). It was an incredible experience that I will write about in more depth later.

…

Good afternoon everybody.

Just over a year ago I was sitting at a bar in Newstead village doing a bout of research for a project that I was doing with the Playhouse which basically involved me visiting a number of ex mining communities and collecting stories from these places for a series of solo shows based on my travels. And I had decided, given the atmosphere in the bar to be cautious in declaring my reasons for being there. Because if you haven’t been to Newstead village do not let your imagination use Newstead Abbey as a template. There are no peacocks in Newstead village. If there were they would be covered in rust or something.

Anyway I had decided to ease myself into the conversation, by just sitting at the end of the bar and hoping that I would be assimilated into the group through osmosis. And after about an hour and a half feeling pretty pleased that my ruse had paid off and that I could now count these men as collaborators, and maybe even put them on my mailing list, I decided that the time was right to talk to them about this valuable community based arts project.

And I told them and they listened and they said “Well it’s all bollocks!” before deciding through some kind of telepathy to totally ignore me just as the landlord finished pouring my sixth pint of Guinness.

And I had three months of this. Although nothing quite as vitriolic. And after a while I began to think that maybe it was all bollocks and began to sympathise with this antipathy towards anything that was seen as ‘art’ because these places appeared to be laden with arts activities dominated by a subtext that seemed to say ‘look, we can help you’. This isn’t just art this is therapy.

And so in Newstead they had decided to set up a special Mayday celebration replete with Maypole and Maypole dancing in an effort to reinstigate a timetable of public events that would help to give the place some shape, to combat an alarming lack of Jack Straw’s beloved civic responsibility.

But the village had never had a maypole. It had been specifically built to service a pit. Tit and knickers nights and dominoes at the Welfare were the prevalent cultural activities. Pagan celebrations never got a look in.

And this confusion over the means with which to create a sense of identity and community was prevalent wherever I went.

‘We used to be close knit, coal mining, chapel going, labour and co-operative orientated working communities’, was the general gist of it. ‘And now we’re not’. And when I asked people what they did do nowadays they said ‘well most us work in sandwich factories and there’s a lot of new Blues Brothers acts coming through’.

Anyway some months later I found myself in the south of the County, working for Rushcliffe Borough Council where I was doing a not too dissimilar project. And these villages used to be stuffed full of ruddy faced and besmocked villagers, stooking the barley, stodging the brooks, bending the willow, and generally being very rustic with each other.

But now they’re inhabited by hordes of people with chamois leathers polishing one of their copious cars. And complaining about plans to build houses in the immediate vicinity because it would destroy the soul of the village.

And I came across the Keyworth Quiz. An activity which has been going on for over 20 years and which has become central to a sense of what the village is. Thirty plus teams from all over the village congregating at the village hall over a two month period to contest the celebrated trophy. And the Quizmaster has to write fifteen hundred questions a year to facilitate this activity. And I wrote a piece gently poking fun at this burden of questioning, because it appeared to me that this was a feat of some magnitude. Four questions a day, every day. You have a couple of bad weeks and you’re having to come up with one every waking hour of your life. And this monologue, which was nothing savage, was banned from being performed in the village. Because it was seen as an attack and a threat. And it all became a bit Stepford Wivesy, the Parish Council sitting around making Muttley noises. Which is odd because having been stung with the bollocks thing in Newstead I had decided to go for the jugular in the piece that I made, to tackle the situation head on, hence the peacock image. And the interesting thing was that the ruder I was about their village the more they liked it. And when I performed the monologue, which was called Crashing Through The Boundary, again at the Nottingham Playhouse, the Newstead Regeneration Officer, one of a growing industry, organised a bus trip and everyone that had seen the thing came to see it all over again. In their best suits and outfits.

Although to be fair to Keyworth they have since allowed myself and John Hewitt to make a film about the quiz. Although we’re expecting blood to be spilled when we finally show it.

And this question of the way in which towns and villages across Nottinghamshire identify themselves following the demise of their traditional communities began to really interest me and when this YOTA thing came up I thought that it would be a good chance of taking some time to look at this further and try to reimagine the County and to explore those places where the impetus for new means of identity could come, and who the new figureheads could be so that Robin Hood, and DH Lawrence, and lace and coal and Methodism could be thanked for their services and placed to one side.

And BBC Radio Nottingham were willing to take me on board which is great because they cover the whole County, serve as a way of cementing locality and community for many people, and loads of lovely equipment to use. And so armed with a minisdisc, and a microphone I will be trying to create a future blueprint for the identity of the County. I’m still reasonably vague about how it will all turn out in the wash, as you’ve probably guessed by me banging on about previous projects, but that’s the plan.

Thank you.

…

Ther first pin that I stuck in the map took me to Mansey Common and Eakring. Whilst there I met a woman who was a Methodist, the last Methodist in the village. Intriguingly she lived next door to Helen Cresswell, the writer who had created Lizzie Dripping, a programme I used to watch as a child, and who, she told me, had been named by Mary (the Methodist) after Helen had heard her shout out to her daughter as she was going off to play – ‘and you make sure you’re home on time Lizzie Dripping!’

This was the resulting monologue.

…

Common Ground

Sound of a fire burning, and of dough being worked briskly. A warm feeling to this. Let this play for around ten seconds.

Listen to that. That’s aggression; that’s what that is.

A particularly hard knead.

It’ll be a fine loaf though. Oh yes. You may as well turn bad things into something good. The Manure Theory. No use weeping and wailing all day. If a moper comes knocking on your door you should always make a tidy excuse, as my father told me. There’s those that deserve sympathy and those that ask for it and if you get tangled up and can’t tell the difference then you’re a bigger fool then they are and you may as well go straight ahead and throw every last bit of time you’ve got into a bottomless pit.

The bashing stops.

There. Behold my loaf of devastation.

Or maybe it would be better as rolls.

Oh I don’t care!

I mean it was surprising it lasted as long as it did really. I should stand here and give thanks.

But I still haven’t built up the courage to write to Mr and Mrs Wilkinson. They’ll feel terrible, I know they will. I can see them now, just after the service had ended, and him explaining how they were going up North. And we all looked around the chapel in a kind of slow motion. And a very odd little sound came out from the back of my throat. A bit like a frog when it’s been stepped on.

He’d only just come back from Iona too, doing his lay preaching training. And I was ever so looking forward to him doing his first sermon in front of them all at Ollerton. Ezekiel’s Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones it was going to be. He did a bit of it in his living room after June had cooked some lovely bacon.

Bread goes into oven.

She opens a door and walks outside. The sound quality changes. Birds etc. (from my Ambient MD)  Again let this play for around ten seconds.

It’s beautiful today. They get better each year you know, these Autumns. There’s a couple of trees down Back Lane that have taken my breath clean away, and I can’t remember them doing that before. Maybe it’s just the gratitude growing.

Sighs. A bird singing.

Two hundred years and that’s that. Shunted into St.Andrews. I know they’ve got the heritage the Anglicans, and they’ve stood the test of time, you can’t deny that. But I’m Methodist stock through and through. Ministers and Lay Preachers that’s what I’m used to. And why they can’t let the vicars write their own prayers if they see fit to do so seems daft to me. I mean surely there’s times when you hunt around in your prayer book for the right thing to say and find that none of them really hits the nail on the head.

And it seems so crowded now. Although ten is hardly what you could call a multitude.

It’ll make a nice house though, that chapel, that’s true enough. Just like the Primitive one. And the old school. And the old smithy. There’s folk after it already I’ve been told. That’s what happens to these places isn’t it? They become lanes full of houses with old in the title. We’ll be called Old Eakring before you know it. Preserved and pickled and all the life sucked out of us. But Methodism isn’t finished yet. Oh no. There’s a good Methodist tradition here, it’s just that there aren’t any Methodists. But some of the other chapels on the circuit are still going strong; it’s not all fingertip stuff. Walesby’s tottering a bit, but they’re still open for services. And I think that one of them have started doing a Songs of Praise type thing – going round the village and asking people for their favourite hymn and then telling them that if they come along on Sunday they’ll be guaranteed to hear it. It’s not a bad idea I suppose but you’re putting your organist under a bit of pressure.

You wonder who will move into it. And it’s upsetting. Because before you know it there’ll be fancy kitchen units and implements where the Minister used to give the sacrament. Not that anybody does any cooking these days. Oh no. They’ve not got the time.

No God and no Time. I don’t think there’s anybody that’s moved into this village that’s got any. They just don’t bring it with them. Which is daft isn’t it. Because that’s what you want in a place like this. I mean look at the clock at St.Andrews. That hasn’t moved forward for years and years and years. If you took that as your guide it would be 6.30 every day, all day. Not that anybody would be able to tell you without looking first. Maybe that’s why they’ve still got the congregation and we haven’t. But they like their clocks don’t they, the Anglicans. Like to make sure everything happens when it’s supposed to.

It’s God’s revenge I think. Every time they shut down another one of his houses he makes Time a little bit shorter. And nobody noticed at first; well you wouldn’t. And then all of a sudden the day’s over before it’s begun and nobody’s got any time to do anything any more. If it was down to me I’d make sure that whoever buys that chapel has some time. I’d want to see it. Come on, empty your pockets. Show me your time.

I mean if Agnes had still been alive then maybe the Wilkinson’s wouldn’t have felt so guilty about leaving me there. She was the staunchest Methodist you’ve ever set eyes on was Agnes. Never bought a Tombola ticket in her life. She had red fingertips when she died from the blackberry picking. A basketful of berries and her lying on the floor of her cottage with deep red fingertips and a sheet white face.

The sound of the dumble now starts and continues underneath this section

I went to the dumble when I found out.

The dumble for about four seconds.

We used to go up there as young girls when we’d fallen in love and be all soppy. She was a good friend was Agnes. Running to the Primitives together so that we could get up to the Balcony and eat our sweets without being spotted. Spying on all the men coming in with their waistcoats and the ladies in their hats.

Dumble for three seconds.

It’s been there since time began that has. Well at least since somebody started making a note of it. And it’ll be there until the next ice age. Because the farmers can’t use that. They can pull down the hedges and put them up again as many times as they like, but the dumble will keep going; digging deeper and deeper into the earth.

There’s hedges standing there that are five or six hundred years old. Folk going back generations would have picked berries from those as they took their beast to graze up Mansey Common. Hardly anybody knows where it is nowadays. And it’s one of the most beautiful things. Most of the commoners are Doctors and Architects.

The dumble fades into the sound of the Methodist church door opening and suddenly Mary is in the church and the sound quality has changed utterly.

I don’t know who was more nervous that first Sunday after Mr and Mrs Wilkinson had left. But it was our turn for the Minister and I could picture him getting ready over in Ollerton. Putting on his dog collar and running out to his car as the rain splattered down. Wondering if it was still worth it. But when he arrived he was wonderful.

And it had such a warm feel that chapel, what with all the oak. The panelling and the pews and the communion rail. And Eakring means a ring of oaks you see, so it all made sense. And his voice seemed to fit that deep colour just right.

It was a lovely sermon; although you felt you had to concentrate all the while. ‘I think the Lord may be trying to tell you something’, he said, ‘maybe you need extra guidance’.

I wonder if he thought it was special like I did.

Oh but it was thriving here it was. It really was. With all the farmers and the men who worked on the fields. The Sunday School and the Women’s group and people coming to read passages from the bible or talk about their own lives. And the anniversary in the second week in May when all the circuit came and the supper afterwards was known as the best Methodist supper in the whole of Nottinghamshire.

You wonder what will come to take it’s place. Because if there’s a space something usually takes root and has a go. Just look at the hedges.

A sudden noise of crowds which carries on underneath this:

I went into Mansfield a couple of weeks ago, to one of the chapels there. And as we were going in on the bus I saw an old man crossing the road. And he had a drink from McDonalds in his hand, you could tell because it had that big M on it. And he was trying to race across because of all the traffic, and the drink was spilling everywhere, splashing onto the road. And it looked for a moment as if he was bleeding, and it was his blood that was splashing all over the ground. And he was holding onto this thing, this throw away cup, for dear life. It upset me very much that did. And I thought I wouldn’t go back there for a good while.

The noise of crowds now moves into the sound of a helicopter flying overhead.

There they go again. Sweeping round the village to keep an eye on those students clambering up the pretend electricity pylons. You’d never believe it would you. A load of massive great pylons built in the village and not one of them producing the tiniest hint of power. But they’ve got to practice somewhere I suppose. Just like the lay preachers. It’s no good going out into the world to do your job and finding that you’re scared stiff of heights or haven’t got a single sensible word sitting anywhere in your head.

That’s where I met Mr Wilkinson and introduced him to Methodism. When National grid used to be BP. The second world wars best kept secret that was, and we were sitting right on top of it. Oklahoma oilmen moving in, wells springing up all over the woods, and work found for a lot of folk. Two million barrels for the war effort.

You wonder if they’ll ever want to try and get at it again. They said it was unviable in the end. But you don’t know how desperate they’re going to get though, do you?

But if they do it won’t be with those old nodding donkeys.

That’s what I was; unviable. Two hundred years and it comes down to the Minister in the pulpit turning the pages of that great big old bible, and me, just me, in the congregation. It’s difficult to avert your gaze in that situation, for the pair of you.

Can you imagine Christ sitting at the table for the Last Supper and seeing that only half of the disciples have turned up because the others were too busy, or couldn’t really be bothered. Getting up to announce that ‘One of you shall betray me’ and realising that nobody is paying the blindest bit of attention.

Sound of congregation singing ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’, (a whole chorus of).

I do miss it you know. My one to one tuition. And I often wonder how the Minister is. We’d begun to work some lovely harmonies.

The sound of the congregation fades into a duet with a one or two harmonies.

 

Copyright Andy Barrett 2000

Time for a community theatre of the absurd?

As I’ve been reading through the texts of the many community plays that have been sent to me one of the most obvious things is that they nearly always have large casts. In many ways this sense of scale, of creating a large cast of characters both to reflect a wide social milieu that can somehow capture the breadth of community, with its many different components and interactions, whilst at the same time creating opportunities for as many people as possible to engage with the process, is at the very heart of what a community play is.

During the eighties and nineties this wasn’t a problem. The community play, as a specific form of theatre, had many cheerleaders and received a good share of arts funding. But such a structure – one that needs a lot of people to engage in it – was always going to be vulnerable if the money started to run out and the rather large organisational costs started to become a little prohibitive. As, it appears, happened.

But there is also a connection between scale and narrative. Organising a very large amount of characters who represent different aspects of the social strata calls for a narrative form which demands clarity, to allow the audience to navigate their way through this mass of humanity. As a result the community plays that I am reading, from the eighties and nineties and into this century, are often full of conflict within and between families, and within and between social classes. There are usually traumas or challenges which families or social groups or whole communities find themselves having to grapple with and which are resolved at the end, often with the characters having learnt something about the larger social world which they inhabit; they have somehow learnt about the role of community in a mirroring of the audiences relationship to the material.

This need for the writer to carefully plot a series of characters journeys through a wider social environment often results in plays that, in terms of their narrative structure, are rather classical and conservative. And coupled with the fact that many are based on historical stories they can appear as though they are the theatrical equivalent of the Victorian novel. It would be difficult to imagine, for instance, a community theatre of the absurd.

The community theatre writer is tasked with balancing agendas and ambitions. As a result of this they have many different jobs and roles (and as I start to interview more writers I will begin to get a sense of what these are). After hearing Gaby Saldanha’s paper ‘Translation as Performance’ at the recent In Dialogue symposium, where she looked at theories of performance and comments by translators to interrogate the performative nature of the art of translation, I have begun to think that one of my jobs as a community theatre writer is a little akin to that of the translator. Of course we have to act as storytellers and dramatists, to construct narrative and plot, but we have a host of other roles to play as well. Chief of which is to somehow translate an evocation of the community – of place, of the local, of some form of collective identity – and to find the right words (and narrative structure) to communicate this.

Alongside this there are the agendas that are brought to the table by the commissioning bodies, and their understandings of what the community theatre playwright is expected to produce. Often these come in the form of explicit social interventions, the idea that the plays are to serve a purpose and that the actual art is really a by-product of a range of interactions  and interventions that take place during the process of creating the finished piece of theatre (interactions which are then evaluated and sent up the shute to someone who can suggest that ‘yes this is all helping’, although it doesn’t really look that way right now).

With the move of much community based theatre into the heritage sector there are other agendas at play still. The social imperative is still there hovering in the background, but these agendas are more about communicating ‘fact’; of unearthing a historical story and re-presenting it rather than using this story as a way to trouble the present. Maybe there is space for work to reflect on current issues, but these usually come in the form of some kind of parallelism – look how what happened then reflects on / can teach us about now. Then there are the agendas and expectations of the community and the participant.

Mid Pennine Arts have recently set up their MPA50 project, one of several examples of  community arts organisations using anniversaries to reflect on their history and to try and unearth artefacts from their many years of work (and often funded by the HLF, such as this project marking the fortieth anniversary of Junction Arts). One of the moments that is well documented by MPA is the visit of Welfare State way back in 1971. There is a letter to the Burnley Express that caught my eye, in which the writer says ‘On Saturday evening my two youngest children persuaded my wife and I to take them to see the ‘Welfare State’ performing one of their – I thought meaningless – rituals on Turf Moor Estate’. And although Keith admits that ‘I can’t say I fully understood what it was all about’ he found the event ‘a most pleasurable experience’.

What is so interesting about looking back at the work of Welfare State is how, through the use of image and spectacle and music, they created a blend of carnival and ritual that allowed a real space for interpretation. Obviously for Keith Whalley such a space turned out to be of much more value to him than he was anticipating. Which, I think, is a very useful admission. It always interests me to see the numbers of people who attend the Nottingham Contemporary where the artwork is often difficult to contextualise and where entrance points for understanding the work are not easy. It seems to me that there may be a greater thirst for people to be lost in something that they cannot quite grasp, which is slightly out of reach, than we realise. In a world where interactions are increasingly monetized and graded and graduated perhaps this sense of slight bewilderment and disorientation is a very healthy one.

With community plays, rather than the community performance model of Welfare State, there is much more of a reliance on text, and an interpretative space is perhaps much less easier to create. The narrative structures, as mentioned above, at least in the large community play model, find themselves needing to tie up threads of plot and story, to draw together the social and character conflicts, to offer resolution. Narrative forms which are highly recognisable, being seen daily in film and television.

But what happens when the production process changes, when the possibility of creating such large works vanishes, as has generally been the case over the last fifteen years? How can a smaller cast, a smaller group of people carry out the weight of the work that the community play is meant to be doing? Might it mean moving away from the narrative form that the larger casts, as I am suggesting, imply? Maybe it offers a chance to experiment with form and narrative. Maybe through experimenting with form and narrative the job of ‘translating’ the community may be done in more potent ways. But doing such a thing, of experimenting with form, is no easy task. Because of the production processes that surround the making of the work.

As well as the HLF the other main funder of community theatre is, right now, the Creative People and Places scheme. As it states on its home page – ‘Creative People and Places is about more people choosing, creating and taking part in brilliant art experiences in the places where they live’ (note the fact that choice is given priority here over the act of creation). From my own experience, and of many others I have spoken to, there is a real disappointment in the way that this scheme has played out.

Instead of genuine conversations between artists and communities that create spaces that may be troubling, uncertain and genuinely creative in their search for a language and form that responds to the very specific questions and environment that the community is grappling with, more often than not the conversation is a very one sided one. Communities get to ‘choose’ and the artists come and ‘deliver’. For reasons of funding, local politics, community agency, but ultimately perhaps of artistic cowardice, the overriding need is to ‘give people what they want’, thereby closing down any real discussion and experimentation in the reaching instead for forms that are readily understandable. The exact opposite of the situation I mentioned earlier at the Nottingham Contemporary.

Theatre and performance is increasingly finding ways to engage with the social creating work that searches for new forms responding to gaming, digital technology, global networks, amongst many other influences. This could be a hugely liberating moment for community theatre makers, and for community theatre writers. Perhaps it is time that a community theatre of the absurd is initiated. Or at the very least a community theatre that is hungry in its search for new narrative forms.