Eschewing the emotional chiaroscuro of more contemplative, claustrophobic visions, this Henry IV 1 is a rollicking paean to the mythology of wild prince Hal. In the Boar’s Head tavern (presided over by a tart Barbara Marten and the beatifically placid William Gaunt), Jamie Parker’s sunny prince disports himself, displaying a most un-regal knack for tumbling, penny-whistle playing and flirting with (delighted) groundlings. Not a whit the Machiavellian dissembler, this is a Hal who morphs from loveable madcap to charismatic martial hero with unselfconscious ease, leaving others to marvel at the suddenness and subtlety of the transformation.

Altogether less blithe is Roger Allam’s Falstaff; a shrewd old soldier, disreputable but far from daft, whose determinedly economic engagement with life’s actualités is a charade accomplished enough to fool everyone but himself. It’s he, and not his easygoing protégé, who broods, bleary-eyed on an uncertain future. But, a showman to his fingertips, he buries this more-sombre-self under a welter of affectionate buffoonery, and the imperturbable facade of habitual vice.

This is a production more concerned with the fate of mates than that of nations. By contrast with the laid-back fellowship of East Cheap, the highly-strung, wasp-stung Hotspur of Sam Crane is a self-regarding liability, callowly fumbling each chance to make his peace with Lorna Stuart’s alert, politic and queenly Kate.

The company’s repertoire of ballads and drinking songs veers tipsily between booze-fuelled jollity and morning-after melancholy, and their air of easy camaraderie suits the show’s unpretentious, blokeish charm. Part 2 is due at the start of July (so watch this space for further news …), but even without its climactic sequel this is a roguishly appealing, stand-alone historical romp.

Electric Hotel is an outdoor performance in a prefab tawdy looking American hotel building for seven dancers, where the audience are invited to listen in through a set of headphones, guided by sound. With four floors and full-length windows, the hotel encapsulates the lives of seven characters, connected by a mysterious blue box and a piercing scream. Directed by Shunt co-founder David Rosenberg, choreographed by Frauke Requardt, designed by Borkur Jonsson and with composition and sound design by Ben and Max Ringham, the performance is a truly collaborative piece that grants its audience the possibility of gazing as deep as they wish into the lives of the people before them.

Structured in loops of movement that develop and accentuate different links between the characters with each repetition, Electric Hotel places the audience in the position of the voyeur, guiding their gaze inside rooms, in amongst bodies and relationships. With each loop the sound reveals different details, suggesting narrative connections and supporting the strong symbolism of the precise and evocative choreography.

Highly reminiscent of David Lynch’s Californian films such as Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, Electric Hotel creates its tension by turning the daily lives of its inhabitants into an emotional hotbed, in which personal tragedy and the hotel’s dark underworld are brought to the fore. From the opening scenes in which we are invited to observe habits, relationships and day to day life, the performance progresses to express the inner being of its protagonists underpinned by a sense of broiling violence, isolation and unfulfilled desire.

Electric Hotel is both a dark tale of loss and a beautiful celebration of the gaze. It feels like the culmination of a brewing desire to experience what happens on the other side of bricks, windows and shadows. Yet the performance toys with voyeurism, creating a world of mad tensions, dark desires and lost dreams in a beautifully symbolic and cinematic auditory and visual experience.

In this interview Diana Damian talks to Tim Webb, Artistic Director of Oily Cart, about his company and its work for children with profound and multiple learning disabilities.

You have extensive experience creating theatre for very young children, and children with profound and multiple learning disabilities. What is your theatre making process? What do you start with, and how does it develop?

We tend to start with a concept or a method that we’ve touched on in a previous show, or come across somewhere else. It might be that we decide to concentrate on a particular sense in a new show. For example, we’re considering a show about scent/odour for a new installation piece and we’re hoping to collaborate on this with the research department of a major scent manufacturer. Our recent piece, Something in the Air, sprang from an exploration of the kinaesthetic sense. We knew that young people with complex disabilities respond well to movement in a performance and so made a piece which was fundamentally about swinging, bouncing and spinning and in which the audience were suspended in moving chairs amongst the aerial performers. On other occasions we like to take a notion like string or paper and worry it to death. Can we do a show in which everything, every sound, every costume, puppet, prop, bit of set is about paper? Sometimes it’s about finding an emotional state or a character that an audience is going to find fascinating. Then I consult with my colleagues, write a script, take it into the rehearsal room and generally watch it get taken apart. We also take care that the theatre we create is not something happening at the other end of the room that you sit and look at. We like our theatre to happen below, above, either side and behind you. We like our performances to begin long before the audience reaches the venue and to continue long after they’ve gone home. It’s 360 degree theatre.

Could you talk briefly about where the idea of Something In the Air came from?

We’ve long been aware that giving a variety of movement in a performance is important, especially for young people with complex disabilities. If you can’t see or hear or either, then the other senses, of smell, of touch, the kinaesthetic sense become that much more significant. If you’re a wheelchair user or other wise limited in movement by braces, splints and the like, again you will relish a greater range of movement, and many young people on the autism spectrum seem to get a great deal of pleasure from quite extreme movement. For years we’ve had various sorts of movable seating: rocking chairs, swing seats and the like in our shows. With the same goal in mind, we’ve done shows on trampolines and in hydrotherapy pools. I wanted to introduce a wider range of movement – with seating that would swing, bounce & spin. We began to realise that we would need a very big rig for that. From that it was a relatively short step to conclude that if we had a big rig it would be possible, and great to have aerialists up there flying with the seats, and approaching the audience from on top, underneath, at their sides, upside down and the right way up.

You collaborated with Ockham’s Razor in the devising of the show. How did the collaboration come about?

Both our companies were performing at the 2007 Manchester International Festival. We loved the Ockham’s Razor show and afterwards I went along to see if they would be interested in offering technical advice on the rig for Something in the Air. After I’d pitched my pitch they said, “Yes. we’ll do that.” It turned out they meant they wanted to perform the show, as well as devise and bring the whole thing to life. It was beyond my craziest dream. Air would have been impossible without them – oh, and also the rigger Joe White. They are all brilliant.

You also collaborate with educators and special needs professionals in your process. What form does that collaboration take in the rehearsal room?

We have educators and special needs professionals on our board and they advise on our programming. We also have very close relationships with two or three Specials School where the staff advise us and we preview parts or all of a work-in-progress. We are fortunate to be based in a South London Primary School, where there is a nursery and also a Language Unit where young people are assessed with regard to autism. We work very closely with the school and preview a great deal of our work there. During rehearsals we frequently invite teachers and the like in to advise on subjects like the use of Makaton signing, the use of hoists, or hand and foot massage.

What role do characters play in your performances, and what do you draw inspiration from? Do you use the same actors for all performances, or do you recast every time?

The characters are often defined by their silhouettes, their texture, their sound, their smell (an essential oil on a wristband can define one character from another) or a prop, which they refer to a lot (an object of reference) and which comes to define them. We don’t recast every time – there’s a wealth of experience in the team which we try hard to hold onto – but in a new piece for young people with PMLD/ASD, 50% of the cast might be new, and they pick up a good deal of what you need to know from watching the old hands in action. I think in most theatre the audience watch the characters and that’s it. In our work, whether for young people with ASD/PMLD, or babies and toddlers, it’s at least as much about the actors watching the young people, and also the adults who generally accompany the young people, to see how their performances are being received, and then nuancing what they are doing to better fit the requirements of the participant.

How do you approach the creation of your environments? Where does the material come from, the textures, smells and sounds?

We set out to create environments, ‘wonderlands’, which will engage the intended audience as completely as possible. Recently we’ve been inspired by an industrial scent laboratory (see first question), part of a wonderful garden festival at Chaumont in France; but also by an eccentric display of alternative housing at Chevotogne in Belgium; and by listening to lots of musicians. Our designer, Claire de Loon, is always on the look-out for and is an expert in sourcing the material that is just right. ‘The devil is in the detail’ is a favourite quote of hers.

You provide a lot of information to your audience before the live event itself. Could you talk a little about that, and how it affects the live event?

This varies from show to show, but basically it involves the concept of ‘The Social Story’ in our work for people with complex disabilities. Many young people with learning disabilities, and particularly those on the autism spectrum, find difficulty in encountering new social situations or meeting new people. Social Stories, widely used in Special Schools, are illustrated books which explain the patterns of society and how you might relate to them. For example, there is a Social Story about eating in public, and another about visiting a grandparent. Of course a theatre performance is a very complex social event, and our Social Stories – in the form of large-format, photo-illustrated books, or a video on DVD, or posted on our website – introduce the characters, set and story that the participants will encounter during the show. We have also used large-format illustrated books containing the story of the show in advance for mainstream nurseries. Young children often like their favourite stories told over and over again, whereas we prefer new work. By sending out the story of the show in advance we can help our young audiences see our show as the dramatisation of an old favourite. When we can afford it, this sort of process goes ‘live’ as we embed characters from a show in a school or nursery for days or even weeks before the actual performance.

What is the role that play takes in your events, and how do you use it to maintain your audience’s interest during the event?

Play is vital to the Oily Cart. Our characters interact with – or play with – the audience continually in our shows. We want the audience to feel that they are inside the game, and that they can affect the course of the game. We also use play areas, set up away from the main performance space, where arriving families or school/nursery groups can settle down, relax and play in a setting which complements the world of the show before they encounter the characters and become part of a more formal play.

What role do you believe theatre takes for your audience?

It depends on which of our several audiences we’re talking about. For example, with young people with profound and multiple learning disabilities who might have sensory impairments, unable to see or hear; or cognitive impairments, unlikely to understand concepts like cause and effect; or memory problems such that they do not remember at the end of a show what happened at the beginning (making conventional narrative inappropriate); we try to offer a great range of options and different ways into the piece. We try to be very flexible to any one participant’s requirements and offer more of what they are responding to and withdrawing those stimuli to which they are responding negatively or not at all.

Our performances are trying to open doors, to find a way of connecting with people for whom connection is difficult. We’re encouraging them to turn outwards, away from the inner worlds where it’s sometimes more comfortable to remain. We want them to communicate with us and we want to communicate with them. Sometimes with the intense focus of a performance our participants react in ways which surprise, even astonish, their families, their teachers, the people who live and work with them everyday. I love those moments, when our participants are suddenly seen in a new light, free of the ‘behaviours’ and the ’syndromes’ with which they are often labelled. Often the things that bring about this perception, for example the feel of a scented sponge on the back of the neck or gentle rocking on a trampoline is something that is easy to reproduce at home or in school. It can be repeated long after the Oily Cart has moved on to the next venue.

What relationship do you feel you have developed with your audience?

We have worked with some venues, especially some Special Schools a great deal over the years (we’ve been going for nearly 30 years) and we often find that the longer and deeper the relationship the more effective the work becomes. Of course the schools, particularly Special Schools have developed a great deal over this period and now we find ourselves working much more with young people with very complex disabilities. Many young people with lesser levels of impairment are now integrated into mainstream schools. More recently the education of very young children has become a priority, for example with the development of the Sure Start programme and Children’s Centre and this has reinforced our own interest in work for the under three’s – and as young as 6 months.

How do you feel the work that you do has changed your approach to and conception of live events as a company?

Necessity has been the mother of our invention. The sort of work that we had to develop, if we were really going to communicate with people who have sensory, or intellectual impairments, i.e. multi-sensory, highly interactive theatre, has, over the years, made us rethink our whole approach to performance. Now we try to make all of our shows address all of the senses and to allow each performance to take its own course, encouraging the intervention of the audience. I’d contend that most theatre is about the spectator perceiving the performer. Our theatre has to be about the performer perceiving the spectator/participant, and indeed any companions (family members, teachers, carers) with the participant, and then modulating the performance to engage them more fully. We need to be as live, playful and in the moment as possible, which I’d say is what all theatre should be about.

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Oily Cart is creating two new productions in 2010. Drum, by Tim Webb is an enchanting interactive, multi-sensory show for babies and toddlers aged 6 months to 2 years old. Performances at The Tramshed, London on Saturday 10th April, as part of the Greenwich Children’s Theatre Festival Tel 020 8858 7755, at the SPARK Festival Leicester from 2nd-4th June, Tel 0116 252 2455 and at Kings Place, London on Sunday 25th July, Tel 020 7520 1490.

A second production will be created for young people of primary school age, who have a Profound and Multiple Learning Disability or an Autistic Spectrum Disorder.

Both productions will tour to nurseries, Children’s Centres and Special Schools in autumn 2010 and spring 2011. To book, contact oilies@oilycart.org.uk.

Angela Davies cunningly sub-divides the stage (using nothing more sophisticated than some lengths of carpet) so that private spaces nestle precariously within the public arena of professional politicking. In the resulting Chinese-box of a court, the passionate rhetoric of a collapsing marriage spills from room to room in the manner of many a domestic row. And Rosenblatt exploits these spatial arrangements to choreograph cinematically-precise sequences of simultaneous action, uniting victor and victim within a single, exacting, narrative of historical necessity.

Round every corner lurks Ian McNeice’s Wolsey, a benevolent scarlet Vice of unbounded stomach, whose inordinate ability to run up expenses turns out to be his undoing. Dominic Rowan makes a powerful and charismatic Henry, torn between his (only marginally self-regarding) sense of kingly rectitude and Miranda Raison’s pensive Ann Bullen. But the real reasons to see this show are the gripping performances of Kate Duchêne and Amanda Lawrence.

Duchêne maps Queen Katherine’s collapse from flirtatious self-confidence to inarticulate panic with assurance, capturing her unequal struggle to mask both fury and terror behind a pious facade of compliant wifeliness. Watching her agonised disintegration, it’s suddenly obvious what Sarah Siddons saw in the role. Lawrence meanwhile, balances this solemnity with a peevish (and sometimes frankly lewd) stream of alarmingly pertinent wittering, casting a jaundiced eye over the bartering of bodies and hearts.

As history demands, Henry gets his way, and his wife of choice (at least for the moment). The sumptuous finale is a riot of gold, with a tiny infant Elizabeth, amid a joyous clamour of choir-boys, provoking prophecies of glory for the realm. It’s a triumph of Jacobethan myth-making. And, what’s more, it’s an absolute triumph for the Globe.

David Greig’s new version for the National Theatre of Scotland aims to repatriate J.M. Barrie’s classic tale to Edinburgh, strategically roughening the play’s edges in the process. So these Darling children are subjected to an educational viewing of a work-in-progress Forth Bridge, where a tribe of ragged boys swagger and swoop among the ironwork , while their engineer father fumes over each second wasted (tick tock, tick tock).

Laura Hopkins’ design splashes lurid, fantastical sunsets against the steely lattice of the unfinished bridge, effortlessly showing what Greig’s script laboriously strives to explain. Her wondrous transformation of this imposing silhouette makes Neverland an anarchic, shadowy subversion of stifling Victorian industriousness, where a lichen-covered stone beehive (with some distinctly magical properties) banishes all hankerings after tradition’s prim Wendy house.

The show also teems with traditional music, work-songs and sea-shanties and hauntingly sad lullabies, a melancholy sound-scape (arranged by Davey Anderson) in sombre contrast to the young cast’s apparently boundless energy. A gasp-inducing Tinker Bell (reincarnated as a bad-tempered ball of fire), Peter’s casual defiance of gravity and some viscerally exciting flying all make a pretty strong case for believing in fairies – though it sometimes seems that the author would prefer it if we didn’t.

Greig’s rewriting of Barrie’s insouciant prose seems determined to spell out what the older play left unspoken, but too often only manages to replace shimmering sentimentality with well-intentioned banality. His re-imagining of Wendy as a stroppy proto-feminist (shades of Pirates of the Caribbean) is occasionally wince-inducing, and making loveable Smee into a gauntly laconic fiddle-player leaves Cal MacAninch’s Hook (a tattooed, kilted hard-man, who definitely didn’t go to Eton) with nobody much to talk to.

Thank goodness Wendy’s last bedtime story survives more or less intact, along with Peter’s tragically un-punctual return to the nursery. The old play’s magic flickers intermittently, but grafting a social conscience onto Barrie’s blithely heartless hero apparently isn’t as easy as re-attaching lost shadows.

The couple scream, joke, kiss, piss, smile, sleep, pass out and cry in an undulating rhythm of ups and downs. Deprived of food and water, their energy weakens over time, and their only connection with the outside world – a mobile phone – proves useless. From a neutral space, filled with irony and humour, the lift gradually takes on an aggressive character as time ticks away.

Under Rachel Parish’s direction, the performance maintains a strong rhythmic dynamic but gets lost in its lack of cultural specificity. Despite an eloquent and evocative translation by Cristina Catalina that skilfully unearths the subtext to this generational paradox, the anglicization of Elevator substitutes clear cultural traits for a diluted attempt at universality.

The play is as much about being trapped as it is about feeling trapped, and it is no accident that its main protagonists are teenagers. Talking about imported American pumps carries a completely different meaning in the West. In a play in which the context, language and characters are so deeply Romanian, relocating the story to a Stockwell estate, rather than the abandoned factory with a cargo lift in an unnamed Romanian city, removes a crucial layer of the play’s meta commentary.

The relationship between freedom and limitation that underpins the text comes to life more in its original cultural context, and the translation would benefit were that relationship maintained. It prompts the question, how do you reconcile the specificity of culture with the pressure of ‘exporting’ one of Romania’s best playwrights to a wider cultural audience?

Still, Elevator is a strong, enjoyable, realist drama about a generation lost in the euphoria of freedom yet stalked by a darker cultural history. A promising start for this new London venue.

Facebook Firsts

Social media blog ReadWriteWeb reported at the end of last year that Facebook recently reached 350 million users, 70% of whom are outside the US, and it accounts for 25% of the Web’s traffic – an astonishing statistic.

As the world’s fourth largest website, it is very likely that you are already a Facebook user, sharing status updates and photos with your online friends. According to the Facebook’s own statistics, over 50% of active users spend more than 55 minutes on the site every day. None of this will come as a surprise to the regular Facebook users among us.

Dig deeper into the statistics however, and some interesting trends start to emerge. There are 1.6 millions active Pages (see below) on the site including over 700,000 local businesses. These pages have generated 5.3 billion Fans. In addition, the average user is a member of 12 Groups. In this article, I will concentrate on how you can utilise Facebook to create Pages, Events and Groups for your business or creative projects and harness the power of the world’s largest social network.

How does it work?

Getting Started
Getting started on Facebook is as simple as creating a profile and uploading a picture. Search for friends and contacts using the Friend Finder and start to build your network. You can use Facebook to broadcast status updates (short entries that chronicle your daily activities), share and comment on photos, share web links, news stories and blog posts, comment on your friend’s ‘walls’ (digital noticeboard), or send them private messages.

But the power of Facebook goes beyond simply connecting with your friends. You can use the platform to organise Events for your performances and workshops, start a Group for your project or create a Page for your company.

Events
Events are easy to create. Go to the toolbar at the bottom of your profile page and click on the Event button. Click on “Create an Event” and add the details (title, location and date). Here you can set the privacy levels for the event – Open, Closed or Secret. With an Open event anyone can access the event page, RSVP and invite others to the event, thereby extending the potential reach of the event beyond your own network of friends. Step two of the process involves adding a picture (if required), a description of the event and setting permissions. The final step allows you to invite all or some of your Facebook contacts as well as others by email.

Theatre company, Theatre in the Square, used Facebook’s event capabilities to promote their recent productions of The Dumb Waiter and Party Time, both by Harold Pinter at the United Reform Church in north London. Creating an event like this for a production allows you to keep track of who is attending your event and to message all attendees from Facebook instead of emailing them individually.

Groups
If you are hosting regular events, such as a theatre networking group or a series of workshops for example, or just want to create a community around a particular project, then starting a Group might be more suitable for your needs. Creating a group is easy with the button located in the Facebook toolbar. Fill in some information about the group and set permissions for members of the group and accessibility to its page (open, closed or secret). As with events, you can invite people to join your group by using your contacts or by email.

An example of a popular Facebook group is David Parrish’s T-Shirts and Suits (Creativity and Business) network. With over 3,600 members, this international group for creative entrepreneurs was set up to enable creative businesses and cultural organisations to share smart business ideas, solve problems, make useful contacts, and create partnerships. David uses the group to promote his regular Coffee Club networking events as well as providing a forum for members of the community to share news and advice, and to start blog discussions.

The Power of Facebook Pages
Moving beyond Events and Groups, Facebook Pages have become a powerful way for businesses to connect with their customers and audiences. Similar to a personal profile page, Facebook Pages allow you to create a branded profile for your business. Setting up a Page is as easy as setting up a personal profile but here you would use your company information and branding. Have a look at Soho Theatre’s page for a good example of a Page in action. Once your page is published, other Facebook users can become “fans” and interact and engage with your content. Soho Theatre has over 3,700 fans – a loyal and interested audience base that they can call on to promote their performances and events. Recent Wall posts from the theatre were offering free tickets for performances and showcasing video content from upcoming comedians (check out this hilarious viral video by Frisky and Mannish doing the Pussycat Dolls’ “Beep”).

Facebook Pages can be made even more useful for your company by integrating other applications developed by third parties. Search the directory for applications that can extend the functionality of your page. My suggested apps include Eventbrite which integrates the popular event management site, and NetworkedBlogs to publish your blog feed to your profile or page.

Making Facebook Work for You

Promotion is the key here. It is a waste of time starting a Facebook Group or Page and not actively promoting it. Put a link to the group/page in the signature of your email and add a Facebook button or link to your website. You can also create a Facebook Badge to insert into your website or blog which can showcase your profile picture, contact details and status updates and allow visitors to click through to your profile or Page. Facebook recently launched a new ‘Like’ button. You can embed the button on your blog or website and allow anyone with a Facebook account to link your content directly to their profile page at the click of a button!

As well as making use of your own network of contacts, ask your friends whether they might promote your group or event on their networks as well. Make the group active by adding events, photos, videos. Use the Share feature that appears on most blogs and social media sites to share new interesting content with your fans. Start discussions and comment on other’s postings. If the group becomes a ‘dead’ space with little or no activity then people will leave.

Facebook usage on mobile platforms is set to increase in 2010, with currently more than 65 million active users accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. With smartphone users on the rise, Facebook could be a smart choice to connect with your target audience.

Final Thoughts

While much of the activity on Facebook involves poking friends, tagging photos and for some, managing farms, it can become an important part of a social media strategy. One thing to be aware of is that Facebook was never meant to be used for business, it was set up as a photo sharing site for Harvard University students, so it’s important to acknowledge the limitations of the site. As with any social media platform, it also pays to be aware of your digital profile and perhaps keep personal social networking profiles and professional ones separate. At the very least, be careful who you accept as a friend on Facebook and make sure that your privacy settings (particularly for your photos) are at a level you feel comfortable with – this is important in light of the recent change in privacy settings.

What’s Next?

In the next article, I will look at the myriad of ways of sharing and published multimedia content including videos, audio and photos using sites such as YouTube, AudioBoo and Flickr.

What attracted you to look at Jane Austen’s female characters?

Even though Jane Austen’s first novel was published 200 years ago, her characters still speak to us through the ages. I have always adored her writing and have loved so many of the television adaptations over the years, but was really aware that we have become so involved in the romances within these novels – the relationships between Lizzy and Darcy, Emma and Mr Knightley etc, that we often overlook the voices of the women themselves. Not just the heroines, but many of the other, lesser known characters.

Was your first step then to remove them from their context and away from any male influences?

The first step was to take a piece of the text aside, see if the voices of these women could stand alone, and tell a story in its own right. I wanted to keep the monologues firmly rooted in the contexts of the stories from which they come, but allow them to breathe and speak for themselves.

What was the process of working with such strong literary characters?

Exciting! Obviously fans of Austen will always have notions of how Lizzy, or Emma, or Marianne, or Catherine should be – but I have certainly found that many members of the audience may know some Austen novels but not others (or have been brought to the theatre by their partner, without knowing any Austen at all). In these cases, it is wonderful for the uninitiated to discover Austen’s work in a new light; I have made sure that I have included some lesser known, but equally wonderful, characters (Mary Stanhope from The Three Sisters, Diana Parker from Sanditon and Elizabeth Watson from The Watsons, for example). For those that know much of Austen’s work, this should hopefully be a treat, and for those who know none of her writings, then these characters can equally stand alone and tell their stories within the play.

Why the choice to present them as monologues?

The vast majority of the pieces were already closer in form to monologues – Lizzy ranting about Darcy, Mary Stanhope deciding whether to marry, Harriet Smith confessing a secret etc. The only real difference is that the audience become the recipient of the information – the person that the character is talking to, and this brings the audience into the stories of these women.

Did you wish to maintain historical specificity? And how about the age of the different characters?

Absolutely. These women are a product of their time, and yet, human nature is such that we can still feel an affinity with them. I wanted to keep the piece firmly within in the Regency/Georgian period, and thus the set and costumes reflect this. The ages of these women range from about 17 to 40, but it is more their social situation that reveals so much about them, than their precise age. Miss Bates is probably in her late 30s, but by Regency standards, she was middle-aged and past her prime. It is therefore interesting to see someone who we would not consider to be old behaving as a middle-aged woman and seeming so much older because of it.

What also leapt out at me was actually how modern these women really are – whether it’s Mary Musgrove moaning about having to stay at home and look after the kids while her husband goes out to have a good time, or Marianne Dashwood feeling the pain of a broken heart, these are all modern tales, it’s just that the characters are 200 years old and wearing different frocks!

How did you approach weaving in text from Austen herself?

Reading, reading and re-reading! I wanted to retain the narrator in the piece and so every time I came across a wonderful piece of Austen’s narration, I made sure I would use it somewhere, to act as the glue to the story and offer a through-line in the play.

What is your personal relationship with the novelist, and ultimately, the characters?

I first came to Austen when I was fifteen, reading Emma, which I loved. I was fascinated that Austen had created a heroine who was so completely flawed, something I am still interested in, and which certainly runs through Austen’s Women.

As a performer, what was your character building process? How did you maintain fourteen separate identities? Did you feel constrained by their literary origin, or free to experiment with them theatrically?

I have been very fortunate to work with Guy Masterson, the director of the piece. As a fan of Austen and being very close to the characters, it would have been easy for me to immediately lock the characters down to what I know of them. But through his experience with solo shows and multi-character work, and his distance from Austen, he was able to help me find all of these characters within me. We have certainly made a few experimental choices, but these I think really cracked some of the characters open. All these women are women that we know in some way or another, and so finding how I blended with them was the fun part!

Do you consider your work an adaptation?

Yes, I think it is an adaptation. After an extensive period of research and reading everything Jane Austen had to offer about 4 times, I was left with about 80 pieces I could have used! So it became a process of finding the through-line, the story between these women, and discovering what other stories emerged on the way. Austen’s Women is certainly an homage to Austen, but it also tells a story in its own right about the Regency woman, and all her trials, tribulations and experiences.

Having explored Austen’s work so thoroughly, what do you feel her relationship with feminism is, and does it translate within the current feminist crisis?

Although I’m sure some would disagree, I certainly see Austen as a proto-feminist. Here was a woman who wanted to write for a living, when not only was it seriously frowned upon for a woman to write professionally, but her family were fairly ashamed of her doing so as well. In fact, her first two novels were published anonymously! And the romantic message that is prevalent in her novels – that you should really only marry for love, if you can – was a very modern way of thinking, and one that she really lived by. She, herself, made the choice not to marry someone she didn’t love, and she knew that by doing so, she was consigning herself to a life of disparaged spinsterhood. But it was a decision she was prepared to take, although she often wished that the choices available to women were greater. I think this is one of the main reasons she still resonates with current readers – I think she really was a woman ahead of her time.

Where do you think female identity lies in our current society, and what is it shaped by?

I think we are in a difficult time. Many women do not feel an affinity with previous incarnations of feminism, yet many do not want to have to retreat back into a post war idea of femininity. Women are trying to carve a way out for themselves where they can choose – where they can have successful careers, be mothers and find a level of fulfilment maybe not achieved before. But this is difficult, as I think we are still living in a very male-centric world – and may well do for many generations to come. I think the media is the real motor behind the shaping of our current society, as well as technology moving at such a pace, that we are always on the go – we have lost the art of peace. But maybe with this, and with feminism, it is being on the journey that counts – not being content with the present state of affairs, but always striving for something better.

Thank you.

Hanna Berrigan’s production of Slowly for The Wrestling School is taut and intense, its drearness undercut with splashes of muted hilarity. Howard Barker’s four funereal madonnas, weeping and wrathful, debate with furious pedantry the manner and meaning of their self-inflicted extinction. But the terrible sophistication of their self-communing is threatened by the very acuteness of their discourse. What will happen if someone dare challenge the premise that pipes the measure for their determined dance of death?

Vanessa Ackerman, Suzy Cooper, Megan Hall and Penelope McGhie flesh out the drama’s bitter abstractions with painstaking care and unfathomable pity. White-faced and wary, their uniform weeds and sculptural formality makes meaningful the smallest physical deviation or twitch, their knotted fingers and wide open eyes silently screaming with tension.

Slowly broods mercilessly on the unseemly slippage between compassion and capitulation, the basest denominators of survival, and the emotional terrorism of willed victimhood. The play is unblinkingly cruel about the place of women in the world and in war (a woman can get by with just three words, one sister tutors another). And it scrupulously declines to judge between the variant duties and desires which consume the four women, briefly, unexpectedly shocked into painful liberty by the violent dissolution of every protocol they’ve ever known.

Short, sour and stinging, Slowly pits the seductive rituals of conformity against the risk and indignity of freedom. Impartially baleful, it makes no promises of happy endings for anyone. The only certainty is that the barbarians, infinitely slowly, continue their advance.

For anyone who’s been living deeper in the wilderness than the fabled man himself, Jerusalem is the tragical-comical-pastoral tale of Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron; once a celebrated stunt-bike rider and now a whacked-out recluse, ever-ready to transform his appropriated patch of countryside into the site of an impromptu rave, benevolently peddling drugs and tall-stories to the shiftless local youth. It’s quite possibly the role Mark Rylance was born for: a magnificent, mad, charismatic composite of Falstaff, Henry V, King Arthur, Nick Bottom, Peer Gynt and Robin Hood, swaggering merrily through the Wiltshire greenwood, ever-ready to instigate some serious ruckus.

Yet Rylance’s Byron has become something of a national treasure. Hordes of well-heeled theatre-goers have flocked to applaud his not-so-much-principled-as-spectacularly-pissed resistance to the forces of mediocrity and local officialdom. That this determined purveyor of anti-social behaviour casts a Shakespearean shadow seems to have done wonders for his social acceptability. But it’s maybe a different dramatic progenitor of Rooster Byron who explains the sentimental fervour with which nicely-brought-up audiences have clasped Butterworth’s dangerously irresponsible waster to their collective bosom.

You see, from the moment that the increasingly-juvenile survivors of Byron’s night-before bash began crawling out of the woodwork, I was unable to shake the image of another set of subterranean children. Not only is there a tribe of apparently un-parented youngsters roaming about his hide-out, there’s even the odd pirate, redskin and fairy to be sighted among the motley and comprehensively lost crew. Admittedly, Tom Brooke and Mackenzie Crook are a mite overgrown for lost boys, but the hapless would-be and never-will-be approach to running their own lives espoused by Lee and Ginger makes J.M. Barrie’s perambulator-dodging gang look like paragons of strategic planning. Maybe it’s worth remembering that Peter Pan himself began life as an unwelcome squatter in the genteel Kensington Gardens, doing the rounds after lock-out time in search of infants lost in the night. And Rooster’s very moniker recalls Peter’s thrilling cry of exultation and defiance.

So, for me, the shade of Peter Pan haunts the Butterworth’s anti-heroic bruiser, casting a fantastical, melancholic glamour over the realities of rural poverty, criminality and violence. And, of course, one of the great charms of Neverland is that its triumphs and tragedies are never, never being thrashed out in our own real-life back yards.