We started Warts and All Theatre back in September 2016. For those of you who haven’t heard of us yet we are the resident theatre company at Delapre Abbey in Northampton. We’ve been trading for 6 months and it’s got off to a very exciting start, writesChris Elmer-Gorry.
Chris Elmer-Gorry
Our work is driven by provoking the artist in everyone. In simple terms that means we are here to make accessible, enjoyable and excellent quality work. Sometimes we create that work with young people and sometimes we work with trained actors. And sometimes both at the same time. We treat them all the same – as artists.
Our weekly programme of workshops consists at the moment of three groups for Young Actors and a group for adults called The Collective: Performers, these groups also have a bursary scheme attached to them for those that are unable to engage with the activity because of cost. In addition to these groups we run a free writing and directing group called The Collective: Makers which meets on the first Thursday of every month. So basically you might be eight or 88 – there is a way you can get involved in our work. We’re here for everyone, Warts and All.
Delapre Abbey
This is one of my great motivations for starting the company. I’ve been working in the industry as a director for 11 years now, for a variety of organisations. It got to May 2016, when I was running around the country directing shows for Plymouth Theatre Royal, Royal & Derngate, Almeida Theatre in London and education work for Northampton College, and although I was loving it and the people I was working with, I started to get an itch to do my own thing. I had a meeting with Delapre quite late on in the summer and it seemed that our objectives were neatly aligned, and so our partnership with Delapre Abbey was born.
Now our weekly groups are up and running we are in the process of applying for funding for various projects for next year… which I am sure I will talk about over our later pieces for The Nene Quirer. For now – this one is more of an introduction to who we are!
We’ve had an exciting week at WAAT HQ, confirming plans for our new and improved Sunday Artist Shindig, where we have confirmed that Brigitte Aphrodite (Www.brigitteaphrodite.co.uk) will perform at the next event and host a Q&A.
Our Sunday Artist Shindig has a different focus each month, and for March it is all about feminist punk poetry and glitter. April is going to be about theatre in the East Midlands. Some months will be free events and some will be paid- depending whether there is a performance element- it’s about covering the costs of the artists mainly- we are big into that at WAAT also! More information about Bri’s work can be found on her website, and we are super excited to be hosting her at Foodies.rocks on 5th March.
Hopefully catch you there,
Delapre detail
Chris
Christopher Elmer-Gorry
Artistic and Execuive Director
Warts and All Theatre Www.wartsandalltheatre.co.uk
@wartsandallco
@gorrylikelorry
The first thing you notice about Jane Hawking is that she talks dead posh, writes Ted Sullivan.
The first wife of the famous Stephen and author of Travelling to Infinity which inspired the smash hit movie about their lives ‘The Theory of Everything‘ speaks in the rounded vowels and grammatically perfect cadences of the well educated and well connected. (She has a PhD in medieval Spanish poetry from Cambridge).
And this is the Jane Hawking (now Hellyer Jones) who came to Oundle in late January to converse about her life with the world’s most famous scientist and her new career as a novelist (her first work of fiction Silent Musicwas published in 2016).
“It was a long time before I could reconcile my life with Stephen Hawking,” she explained to the capacity audience at Oundle School’s Great Hall. “Whether I wanted it or not, Stephen’s reputation had brought our life into the public arena and I had little option but to write it down.”
She feels that even Stephen Hawking himself, restricted to a wheelchair for most of his adult life because of Motor Neurone Disease, would not have known as much as she did about the situation that faced them and their three children.
Jane Hawking at Oundle School
She spoke in measured tones from a prepared script and was politely received, as if addressing a church congregation. The uncharitable observer might say her lecture contained minimal amounts of humour, but perhaps it would be fairer to say that such jokes as there were might have had currency at a vicarage fete, but would not have gone down well as stand up. Jo Brand she definitely ain’t.
No one who has read her book or seen the film (starring Oscar winning Eddie Redmayne as Stephen and Felicity Jones as Jane) would be in any doubt that she went through a considerable amount of shit over decades to keep their lives afloat.
Although she never says so explicitly, it’s also abundantly clear that without Jane, her severely disabled husband would probably not have survived or been able to achieve his remarkable career success. Bolstered by her Christian faith, she took on this burden willingly, knowing what to expect: acting as her husband’s sole carer, raising their three children, looking after their home and acting as chauffeur and travel organiser for their many trips around the world.
“I wanted to reveal the stark horrors of motor neurone disease, particularly for the families and carers of the victims and their exhausted families.”
Also beyond question is the fact that the film, and the subsequent ice bucket challenge, have helped raise awareness and millions in funding for MND research. (£7 million according to Jane) Eddie Redmayne has now joined Stephen Hawking as a patron of the MND Association.
Jane and Stephen divorced in 1995 but have maintained amicable relations. She recently attended his 75th birthday celebrations in Cambridge complete with fireworks. What’s her final judgement on that relationship?
“There were four partners to our marriage. Stephen, me, motor neurone disease and the goddess of physics.”
Now that’s a dead posh way to end a literary evening.
Sue Wright of The Hope Centre has announced that The Big Sleep Out 2017 could raise as much as £45,000.
The target of £40,000 – beating last year’s total of £38,000 – has been achieved but sponsorship money is still being collected and the total will rise over the coming weeks.
In an update to our story on the sleep out, in which The NeneQuirer’s Steve Scoles took part, a report went before Northampton Borough Council’s scrutiny committee this week estimating the number of rough sleepers in the town to be around 40.
Last year a Northampton Borough Council investigation found that there were around two dozen habitual rough sleepers in Northampton.
On Friday January 27 this year at The Big Sleep Out, 170 house dwellers (what do you call the non-homeless?) bedded down in Abington Park for the night to raise funds for them.
Over £40,000 is predicted to come in and you can still add to the total.
I joined the sleeper outers (my Just Giving page is here) and somehow it felt ironic that we vastly outnumbered the town’s real rough sleepers. Around half a dozen usually sleep in Abington Park and there we were crowding into their bedroom full of good intentions, coffee and cake. They probably thought we were one tent short of a festival.
My favourite curmudgeon has had words with me about The Big Sleep Out. His basic complaint is that there is not enough suffering on the part of the participants. It is not, after all, a camping event.
“You’re supposed to be getting a taste of what it’s like to be on the streets,” he complains.
Preparing shelters for the night at The Big Sleep Out 2017
I must admit when arrived at Abington Park Café, generously open to support the event, I was struck by the determined work that some of the early arrivals were already putting into their shelters. Tables and chairs were being pressed into service to hold up tarpaulins and plastic sheeting. Cardboard was being laid out to bed down on. The bandstand filled up quickly and even acquired a tarpaulin wall. The atmosphere was upbeat.
It was nothing like being homeless. Of course. How could it be? Not having somewhere to sleep is often the smallest problem in the life of a homeless person which might be blighted with mental health issues, addictions or physical illness. And one night sleeping out is not the point – it’s the every night that is the problem.
Big Sleep Out participants queue to sign in at the event
The money raised by The Big Sleep Out funds the work of the Hope Centre which aims to help the homeless take back control of their lives. In many ways the relatively small number of rough sleepers is a testament to their work intervening before people end up on the streets.
Robin Burgess, the Chief Executive of Hope, (which is quite a cool job title) was outside the café in a high vis jacket. He confirmed that he would be seeing it through until 8am and I asked him how he felt the night was going.
Chief Executive of Hope Robin Burgess in the Abington Park Cafe
“We are doing the stewarding making sure everyone is feeling, safe and secure. I think there are quite a lot of people here. It’s my first night doing it. The most important thing is build a good shelter first up because if it rains and it collapses in the middle of the night – not a good idea. Make sure you build something secure, ideally against a wall,” he explained.
I’m not that impressive as a homeowner but I’m a lot less impressive as a homeless person. I hadn’t even moved the table that I had based my shelter around, let alone found a wall. If homelessness was a reality TV show I would almost certainly have been thrown back into civilised society on the first episode.
I wondered about the people who experience it for real and asked Robin if they would be watching us.
He said: “After we have all moved away there will be six people sleeping in this park. We pretty much know every single rough sleeper in Northampton. I was talking to someone on Tuesday who told me he built a den in this park and slept here for months. They all come into the day centre, maybe not every day, some every week. People are here. They are all around us. We probably won’t see them but they are here. Unless housing policy changes, house prices improve, rents go down, homelessness will continue to rise. It is a dangerous and horrible existence.”
When I was struggling across the park in the dark with everything I had for the night piled up in my arms, I was glad that it wasn’t part of my daily routine. If I had to carry everything I owned with me everywhere I wouldn’t take much of anything anywhere. Hypothermia or complete exhaustion is not much of a lifestyle choice.
The Big Sleep Out in Abington Park
And I wasn’t bone cold from spending the whole day outside, or tired from walking miles and I had on the very best in clothing technology I could muster. Fleeces, dry socks, layers upon layers. I had broken into a sweat by the time I dumped my stuff and signed in. The cloud cover was trading us a mild night for a bit of light rain.
The truth was, I was so terrified of being cold all night that I had stuffed my backpack with extra layers and forgotten my sleeping bag. The long suffering H drove down and delivered it to me. The carbon footprint of my night as a homeless person was looking decidedly dodgy.
The support network keeping me sleeping rough all night included a café, numerous stewards, an emergency package driven out to me from home, the best outdoor gear from the shelves of Aldi and my own car parked nearby.
Rees and Darren from Reach Out Northampton
Darren and Rees are from Reach Out Northampton which is the support network that looks out for real rough sleepers. In many ways they take over from the Hope Centre on a Friday night and go looking for vulnerable people out on the streets, keeping an eye on the welfare of people they know and noticing if someone has gone missing.
So who is out there?
“We are finding Russians, Romanians, Polish quite a bit,” said Darren. “There is English, people in the deaf community, not many ladies. We have people who have come out of prison. One guy was explaining the reason why he doesn’t trust the system is that he was getting rent demands while he was in prison for a property he obviously wasn’t in. It’s ludicrous.”
Rees added: “We are starting to notice a lot of younger homeless people who have come out of supported accommodation, more soldiers who might be suffering from ptsd (post traumatic stress disorder) and are not reintegrating back into society. Sometimes it is the same faces with new problems. People who have been taking legal highs and are much closer to death than they realise. Homelessness will always be with us in some form. It is about how we come together to deal with it.”
Behind the Abington Park Cafe Conservative councillors joined the Big Sleep Out
During the night I encountered people from all walks of life shuffling their way into the café to use the loo or have a biscuit. Former Northampton MP Sally Keeble was dishing out moral support. There was a pod of Conservative councillors bedding down in the bushes. Kettering Business Network had some problems keeping the rain out of their shelter. I saw Ian Bates from the Umbrella Fair Organisation arrive on his bicycle and I would have said hello but I had just got cosy…
The next pitch along from mine belonged to Elissa Shrive who lives a ten minute walk from the park. She had installed an umbrella over a chair and wrapped herself in a sleeping bag.
Elissa Shrive wrote a poem about the sleep out
She was unexpectedly alone for the night: “I got enlisted to come here. I thought some work colleagues were going to meet me here but I cannot find them. I wrote a verse to read out to them. In for a penny in for a pound…
We are gathered here tonight To make aware and appreciate Our warm homes and the plight of others The cold, the hardship they endure Some are frozen to the core We must be thankful For what we have A nice warm home And an indoor lav
“I thought I’d end it on a light note but it’s true actually. It’s my first time, I’m enjoying but it’s early. It’s not quite as cold as it was last night.”
Sleeping out for one night, supported by the experts, a benign blanket of light rain cloud and the Abington Park Cafe was much more fun than hardship. It was difficult to sleep in the damp but difficulty sleeping does not strike me as the biggest problem facing real rough sleepers.
As a young reporter I got properly involved with the life of a rough sleeper called Jimmy in Bedford.
By liaising with various people that a journalist could pick up the phone and talk to but a homeless person couldn’t, I secured Jimmy a flat, a job collecting supermarket trolleys and an appointment to see a heart specialist. A week after his triumphant return to ‘normal’ life after years on the streets he was back in our office asking to see me.
He looked a bit ragged and as soon as we were in private he burst into tears, apologising profusely. He was saying sorry because he was back on the streets.
The people he drank with ‘under the arches’ had found his flat and had come visiting. A flood of official letters (the bureaucracy of returning to the system in the 1990s) had also unnerved him because he couldn’t read. The advice from his peer group was clear cut and reassuringly familiar – back to the streets.
Jimmy lasted about another year before his heart problem took his life, not because sleeping out was hard but because it was the frighteningly easy option for him.
The part of rough sleeping that we did at The Big Sleep Out – enduring the elements and getting cheered up with hot coffee – was the easy bit. If anything that is the lesson we should learn from it. It is not the cold that stops us from crawling into the shadow of a bush or a bin at night – it is our lives, having somewhere else to be.
So if you really want to tackle homelessness are talking about changing someone’s life and that is not something, as I found out, that you can do in a superficial way. It is a long, complicated and expensive job and the people that do it need every penny they can get.
The Big Sleep Out for Northampton Hope Centre Picture: @NptonHopeCentre
It’s appropriate that the first assignment for The NeneQuirer is a look at homelessness because at the time of writing the magazine does not yet have a home.
I am joining The Big Sleep Out, Northampton Hope Centre’s annual fund raising event that last year attracted 140 participants and raised £38,000 to help the centre fight the causes of homelessness.
Northampton MP David Mackintosh taking part in the sleep out Pic: davidmackintosh.org
The idea is as simple as it sounds, you sleep out like you’re homeless for one night and you collect sponsorship for doing so. Of course you are not facing the full range of challenges that bring people to that situation in real life, but you are at least experiencing the cold of their world.
This year it is happening in Abington Park between the bandstand and the cafe. We have been provided with a kit list, we get signed in and out by stewards and have been briefed on the signs of hypothermia to watch out for. The kit, I should add, is extra layers of clothes, sleeping bags and the essential sleep out item – a cardboard box to lie on.
Good for wrapping around you when sitting/ standing around
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Clothing Layers
· Thermal long johns, tights or leggings
· Extra pair of jeans or tracksuit trousers OVER usual trousers
· Waterproof trousers (in bag just in case)
· Thermal long sleeved top/vest or tight fitting t-shirt as underlayer
· Minimum two further thin layers, pref with long sleeves
· Warm jumper/sweater(s) – at least one
· Very warm, weather proof coat/jacket
· Scarf
· Thermal hat
· Gloves
· Waterproof jacket/cagoule
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Weatherproof footwear & extra socks and/or thermal socks
Preferably boots that are a size bigger than usual so that you have space for several pairs of socks without them being tight (tight shoes = cold feet!)
Wrangle, Leake and Drainside pass by as I drive. Small settlements and thoroughfares with names that remind me England can still be remote and unusual. It’s a surprise in a shrinking networked world to discover places not so far from home that feel alien.
It’s especially surprising in the flatlands of the British fens because you believe, facing a wide sky and gaping horizon, that you can see it all and that you know what is there. Hedges, ditches and dykes, the occasional cluster of trees gathered round a farmhouse, relentless furrowed acreage. Nothing much.
But then towns and villages with brutally utilitarian names spring out of nowhere. The houses sit stubbornly at the roadsides in twos and threes looking oddly out of place even though this barely counts as a place at all. They are finished in the style of homes from sprawling urban estates: all economy of design and efficient use of space and materials. Normally houses like this are built in regiments, dominating the land they are on, but here they look isolated and one wrong turn away from being lost in emptiness forever.
This is the journey to Skegness.
It takes a toll on you that you cannot escape. You pay in time. You pay in boredom. The route I follow, approaching from the southwest, offers only one mile of dual carriageway in the final 50. The rest is single lanes dotted with crawling tractors, articulated trucks heading for factory farms and sudden right handed bends around fields. Sometimes you drive at 50, sometimes you drive at 40, sometimes you sit with your engine idling waiting for a vehicle ahead to make a right turn. One way or another there is a cost in time you cannot avoid.
You sit there waiting for the landscape to roll by. Occasionally you are tempted to overtake something despite the Red Route warning signs on the verges telling you how many dozens have died on the road that year. There are heavy penalties for mistakes on these highways: head-on smashes or drops into drainage ditches that are deep enough for trapped motorists to drown in. There is real danger here for those who do not submit to the tedium of the journey.
So what do you do in your little metal box when the featureless geography has released its slender hold on your attention? You turn on yourself. You cannibalise your own mind for stimulation. First you let your worries in because they are always at the front of the queue when you throw open the doors of your imagination. Then the ‘what ifs’ and the ‘should haves’. You entertain hunger, thirst and the need to relieve yourself. Do you smoke? Don’t run out on this journey. You change the channels on the radio again, play that CD again. You edge out to try to see past the truck ahead.
This is the journey to Skegness.
You lurch from boredom to weighing up the odds of death and then back to boredom. A bigger, faster, shinier car might roar past and just make it before the oncoming traffic. You are pleased to see that car is only one or two places ahead in the queue when a roundabout finally arrives. No-one escapes. Turn off if you want. When you are this deep in the Fens it is the same in all directions until you reach the edge of the land where the great, grey, sea is waiting.
Here at last is Skegness.
It is a holiday resort for the working man and in every sense the pleasures on offer here are earned, even if it is only by the act of making the deceptively arduous journey. It is a town where small pleasures are big business. In the main street you are never more than ten footsteps from cakes, chips, booze, sweets or tattoos. In amongst the traditional treats there are oddities: a rack of pellet guns that are replicas of modern assault rifles – so realistic you cannot imagine how someone would make it out of the shop without being taken down by police marksmen. Across the street a sweet stall offers nougat and rock in a range of novelty shapes: confectionery lollies, fruit baskets and penises lying side by side.
Skegness pleasure beach
The leisure tides usher shoals of customers to the doors of these outlets in and out of holiday season. It’s autumn, the seafront thrill rides are closed but still the visitors arrive wandering wet streets under grey skies with a slightly bewildered look on their faces, as though they woke up here unexpectedly.
Skegness tourists make the best of it. They wear holiday clothes because they are on holiday, not because the weather or their age suits it. A daytrip here is an act of pure will. Vest tops and short skirts team up with walking sticks and umbrellas. Arms and calves swirl with tattoos. They stare at you like cats deciding whether you are a threat or prey. Do you know which you are? You will after a trip to Skegness…
If I start out with a header like ‘The best thing I’ve ever seen at the theatre’ I know I’m being misleading straight away.
It’s a woolly statement: who knows what I’ve seen at the theatre? And do I mean this theatre or any theatre? And even if you accept that I really genuinely mean it rather than just having my silly head turned by being in the right mood in the right place at the right time – would it be true for you too?
So here’s precisely what I mean by that heading.
It came out of the way I was feeling during the applause at the end. I always applaud. I always applaud some more if there is an old pro on stage who has the timing and gumption to prolong it by sneaking in another bow. But usually when I’m applauding I feel that I’m papering over a couple of ifs and buts with claps (unless I’m at a big commercial pantomime when I’m just doing what I have to do to get out of there).
After Bully Boy at Northampton’s Royal and Derngate Theatre tonight for the first time I can ever remember at a theatrical event I was applauding without prejudice or reservation. I meant absolutely every clap. If I had been the only person in the auditorium I would have been applauding just as much. Would I expect other people to feel the same way? I don’t know.
It was a play about the impact of military service on a person’s life, particularly the effects of being in combat and post traumatic stress disorder. It was written by Sandi Toksvig who is best known as a comedian and panellist on a number of top comedy shows. I didn’t doubt her ability to handle the intellectual challenge (she’s a bit QI and Radio Four) but I was prepared to make allowances for her as a writer. However as the play went on I realised I wasn’t having to make any allowances.
The performances from Anthony Andrews and Joshua Miles were very strong indeed. They inhabited their roles seamlessly, old soldier and crackling young buck respectively, and there is no doubt that Sandi’s words were in good hands. The set design – which is always a strong point of R&D productions – was spare but clever. The staging was dynamic. Everything worked really well.
But the best part of this for me was the uncompromising approach Bully Boy (and perhaps this title could have been something cruder and more abrasive) took to the cold hard facts of the story. The plot follows an investigation into the death of a young boy and his mother. Andrews is the investigator, a wheelchair bound Major haunted by his own war stories and Miles is the accused dragged back into the value system of the ‘civilised’ world while his mind is still observing the honour code of the battlefield.
It is not a courtroom drama, however. Bully Boy teasingly invites you to weigh up the innocence of the central character while reminding you that when someone goes to fight a war the very first thing they lose is their innocence. The distinction between the heroic, villainous and ridiculous is random and this is what both men find themselves grappling to come to terms with. The warmth of the play comes from watching these two wounded soldiers attempting to haul each other by turns to a place of safety.
There is nothing trite about the way Bully Boy engages with its subject matter, it bristles with uncomfortable truths and is so much the better for it.
I saw Sandi Toksvig afterwards and told her I liked it. I asked her what the response from veterans had been and she said it had been very good.
“A military charity was involved in the production which helped make sure I got the details right,” she said, in her very gentle conversational voice which is a surprising contrast to her broadcasting tone.
So I think it’s good. I’ve never applauded quite the same way before. Now you know. Now the writer knows. It’s on at Royal and Derngate until September 15.
The press tent at a music festival is an interesting place to be. It is an oasis of calm of sorts, albeit one where there is a lot of work going on.
At Camp Bestival it was decked out like a harem tent except inside instead of nubile wives passing the day practising their nubility there were banks of photographers hunched over laptops, cropping pictures and sharing war stories. Every now and then pop stars would venture into the lion’s den to do interviews with broadcasters and a quick photocall.
As it was a family festival they were pretty good about rounding off the session by having their pictures taken with the journalists’ children. My One True Love knows I’m an admirer of the all-girl three piece, Stooshe, and had offered to take a picture of me and the kids with them at just such a photocall. I’ll admit the idea appealed and I almost took her up on it.
Stooshe came out of the tent, turned to face My One True Love and bent over to hug my kids. I was faced with the stark choice of being in the picture or staying sat where I was. As you can see, I managed to do both, just. All I’m saying is Camp Bestival is for dads too.
While we were buying our ice cream and Pick N Mix to take into Batman: The Dark Knight Rises the queue was alive with chatter about the shootings in America two days before.
A gunman in a gas mask burst into a Denver cinema during a showing of The Dark Knight Rises. He threw a canister of gas and then began shooting, 12 people were killed outright including a six year old girl and another 58 were wounded. Apparently the audience thought the sound of gunfire was part of the action on screen.
James Holmes was arrested outside the cinema. Over the past 24 hours bomb disposal experts have been dismantling booby traps in the 24-year-old former PhD student’s home. He has been in solitary confinement since. The New York Police announced they would be keeping an eye on Big Apple cinemas to prevent any copycat incidents.
Common sense says there is no reason to make a connection between the film and what the gunman did but it is impossible to deny the connection exists now, as unshakeable as a shadow. He could have chosen other films, we saw a trailer for The Expendables 2 before our showing of Batman. Full of shooting and killing, balletic slow-motion carnage crafted with lingering care to be savoured as a thing of beauty.
He could have chosen that film or any number of others but he didn’t, he chose Batman, his gas mask eerily reminiscent of Batman’s masked nemesis Bane. The villain has a sociopathic contempt for the innate corruption of the Gotham residents and there is a sense that the havoc he wreaks on the city is in some way a punishment for the rotten edifice it has become.
The destruction in the film is spectacular: an American football field collapses into a crater, bridges and buildings are pulverised by explosions, vehicles are thrown around like toys and an aeroplane is gutted in midair like a shot gamebird. The violence matches it, from large melees of police and mercenaries to set piece confrontations between Bat and baddie, there was even something sexy about the way Catwoman kicked away Bruce Wayne’s walking stick.
You begin to realise that this is our generation’s version of the big song and dance movies of 50 years ago. Instead of sets crammed with showgirls and slick-haired leading men the choreography is now about hundreds of punches being thrown, thousands of bullets being fired.
Our culture does this. The catharsis is up there on screen: the release of violence after the building tension of the plot. We love it, it would be a lie to pretend otherwise. I loved this film. The bits of it I thought were weakest were the bits when the peril and threat were least convincing. It’s an uncomfortable truth against a backdrop of real horror.
So is there a sense in which the shooting in Denver was in some way a culture that venerates violence reaping what it had sowed? Let’s take the bleakest view and say yes, but even if that is the case it still requires a broken mind and someone to sell that broken mind a gun to make the fantasy real. We can’t stop broken minds but we can stop selling guns. It seems like a no brainer to me.
