Making Tea

Photo by Stuart Boulton, courtesy of the Northern Echo

There's a longer post to be written - soon I hope - about the mentoring work we've been doing with other artists and companies recently. But this isn't that post. This is more like an additional programme note to Tea is an Evening Meal, by Faye Draper, and me, currently touring as a collaboration between Northern Stage and Third Angel.

If you've seen any of a particular strand of Third Angel's work over the years, or if you've been to a workshop we've run, you will have detected a passing interest with furniture. That furniture might be domestic (it often is) or might be street furniture, and it speaks of a fascination with the spaces in which people meet, spend time, relate to each other.

Last year Sheffield-based, Lancashire-born artist Faye Draper was commissioned to create a piece of work as one of forty 'conversations about Northerness' to celebrate Northern Stage's fortieth birthday. The commission included money for "a mentor", and Faye approached me; when she told me the idea, I immediately understood why.

A couple of years ago I ran a three day workshop as part of the fantastic A:CT (Access: Contemporary Theatre) programme at Leeds Met Gallery & Studio Theatre. As a way of creating a trajectory from the Friday evening to the Sunday afternoon, I worked out a plan that all of the exercises would be linked to a table in some way. Faye was one of the participants on that workshop, and so thought that I might be interested in working with her on her show staged around a large dining table, with her, the performer, sitting in amongst the audience at the table.

She wanted to talk about the way her family meet at dining tables, and had already begun gathering stories from other people, too, with the aim of exploring regional differences and identity. It felt like rich territory to me and I was keen to be involved. Now, this might be one of those things that is much more interesting to those of us involved in making the work than anyone coming to see it, but it is significant to me that we deliberately avoided defining in advance what my role would be. We called it "mentor" for contract purposes, but Faye and I agreed we would just let it be quite organic.

The project had the money for me to be involved half-time, and Third Angel was able to support Faye with rehearsal space, allowing us to keep that half time flexible and responsive. Somedays I would be in quite a lot, watching material, suggesting things to tryout, giving feedback; other days I'd be in for coffee and a chat in the morning and then leave her to it. A combination of co-devisor, director, mentor and (of no-little significance when making a piece on your own) company.

Tea is an Evening Meal is undoubtedly Faye's show, and I am proud to have helped her to realise it. But I also think that if you know our work, then you'll find a flavour of Third Angel in there - or at least see why Faye felt we were the right company to approach to help her make this piece.

After a successful run at Northern Stage last year we came back to the piece a couple of months ago in preparation to tour it. It is often telling when you come to revive a piece after a break from it - in really basic terms the question is, "Is it as good as we remember it?" We were really pleased that we felt just as strongly about it, and I was really eager to see with an audience again. I always find it difficult re-rehearsing work that has been in front of an audience previously, it feels restricted to not have that live energy to play off. This was even more the case with Tea, as the audience of just thirteen sit in for various characters in the show.

But it was also really enjoyable to do a bit of fine tuning: to formalise the physical score ever so slightly, clarify the rules of "casting" the audience - or their chairs - in to the different stories, and to update Faye's perspective on the content almost a year later - a year in which she has had a baby, and so has a new relationship to meal times and, particularly, cups of tea. One day in Sheffield we were joined by Erica Whyman and Mark Calvert, Artistic Director and Creative Associate, respectively, of Northern Stage. It was a real joy to discuss the work with such invested and talented collaborators, although three directors to one performer was maybe a bit much. Directors. Yes, this time my role has been more clearly directorial, because that's what the project needed now.

Opening the show at ARC, Stockton, it was great to play to two such different audiences (Faye is usually doing two shows a day on the tour). The first was clearly a group of people who largely knew what to expect. The second was a mainly female audience who had come along because they liked the sound of it but had no idea what to expect. It's always useful to remember that no matter how welcoming a performance is, nor how gently the audience involvement presents itself, sitting at a table for a performance, where they can be seen by other people, and are talked "about" occasionally by the performer, is a massive step for some audience members. A few of them were obviously out of their comfort zone by some distance at the start of the show, but tea, biscuits and a very friendly show meant that they had a good time, and ended up participating more actively than they were "required" to by the end.

Faye is still collecting stories and opinions about tea (the drink) and tea (the meal) - feel free to join the discussion here. And a full list of tour dates is here.

Class of '76 at Northern Stages

The 10th Anniversary tour of Class of '76 opens at Northern Stage next month as part of their Northern Stages season - marking their own 40th Anniversary with a great line up. Northern Stages is a series of 40 'conversations' about Northerness, of which Class of '76 is one.

There are several ways of engaging with the season, other than coming to see the work live. The Northern Stages project is seeking thoughts and input about Northerness/Southerness, through the Northe research project. I'm also mentoring another of the 'conversations', Faye Draper's Tea is an Evening Meal - for which she is looking for input from the public, so if you have thoughts on, or stories about, regional dining rituals, Faye would love to hear from you.

As part of the programme I was asked to think about the relationship between Class of '76 and my adopted Northerness, and write something for the Northern Stages site. Here's what came out:

When we were first making Class of ‘76, (Version 2 - the version for Chuckery Infant School), 10 years ago, my initial thought was that this was a show about how a group of 35 kids happened to be in the same class at the same time, and how they happened to have their photograph taken together, and how, 24 years later (as it was then), they could have ended up anywhere, doing anything. They could have chosen to base themselves anywhere. How many would still be in the Midlands? How many would have moved South, North? And for how many would that have been a conscious decision, and how many would have just followed circumstance. How often, in fact, do we decide to exercise the control we have about where we live? And of course, does that ever change where we are from?

You can take the boy out of the Midlands... My moves North were accidental – I went to university in Lancaster, then Sheffield. That was because they were the courses that let me on. Plenty didn’t. But I had chosen to apply for those courses partly because I liked those cities. And most significantly, I stayed in Sheffield. There are all sorts of work, friends and family reasons for that, of course – but we have talked about moving over the years, and it was always going to be further North (the exception being some talk of moving to Bristol, because it “feels like a Northern city but with Southern weather”), maybe to Scotland. (The other exceptions being some talk of Spain. And Portugal.)

As a person somewhat obsessed with maps, I am very aware that the Midlands are not in the middle of the country, they are geographically in the South. (Sheffield, in fact, feels to me more like the centre of the country – but I know that there are several towns and villages that would dispute that, depending on how you measure it). The cliché when I was growing up was that Southerners think of Midlanders as Northerners, and Northerners think of them as Southerners. The other joke was that in England, the North-South Divide runs across the country south of Birmingham, but loops up around Solihull.

The reality, naturally, is more complex that either of those suggestions, and certainly being a Midlander, I think of the Midlands as a separate entity. Or should that be ‘originally’ a Midlander? I lived in Walsall for 19 years, and I’ve now been in Sheffield for almost 17. These days I refer to myself as being ‘from Sheffield’ as much as I do as ‘from the Midlands’. And being a father now, I am aware that, unless we do move, my girls will think of themselves as ‘from Sheffield’. My daughters are Northerners, with a Midlander dad and a Southerner mom.

As we prepare for the 10th anniversary tour of Class of ‘76, I’ll be thinking more about this, about the other 34 children in my class photograph, about when we were all from the same place, and where the adults they grew up to be are now.