Soho Theatre has always been at the forefront of pioneering performance. Not afraid to put on plays that fuse politics with theatre it is the ultimate venue for catching shows that will not only entertain, but also make you think.
Theatre Uncut is one such company that is plugging in to the concept of theatre as a vehicle for inciting political debate and discussion. An initiative born out of frustration at the 2010 coalition government spending cuts, the company produce a series of short plays – written by the UK’s most exciting playwrights – based on the current political landscape.
Theatre Uncut, however, is not a didactic, throw-politics-in-your-face affair, far from it. Developed from an innovative process, the five short plays are interlinked to form one cohesive whole and a Q&A follows each performance with the audience. This structure aims to create an environment that incites debate and conversation amongst audience members on the current political issues raised by the plays.
Further to this, the five plays are all rights free during the two months that Theatre Uncut perform, enabling anyone who would like to get involved to download the scripts and interpret them in whatever fashion they desire. Over the past three years 6000 people in over 24 countries have performed the plays.
With this year’s short pieces written by the likes of Clara Brennan, Inua Ellams, Vivenne Franzmann, Anders Lustgarten and Hayley Squires, Theatre Uncut – which starts its London run this evening at Soho Theatre – is not one to be missed.
Ahead of the first London performance tonight, we spoke with Co-Artistic Director Hannah Price to talk theatre as a vehicle for change, the effects of too much information and what responsibility art should take in discussing what’s happening in the world right now.
Tell us a bit about Theatre Uncut… What inspired it and how did it come about?
It started at the end of 2010 when the government announced their spending cuts – I was flabbergasted by who they were going to effect – it all felt very dark to me. I was working with Mark Ravenhill at the time and we thought we should do something about it. He said he would write a short for me – we got talking about that, then we invited a few other writers to do the same and came up with a plan to release the plays rights free across the world. The plan was to see if we could get a number of people to perform them simultaneously. So, we did! The first year we had eight writers, with about 90 groups performing the plays in different countries around the world. It grew from there.
What theme did you choose for the plays this year?
This year we wanted to put the question of what we should be discussing in the plays firmly in hands of the participants - the people who consistently perform the plays around the world. They came back with so many different issues – which felt part of a bigger problem of feeling overwhelmed. With the growth of the Internet – with buzzfeed, Facebook videos, so much information to consume… it felt like there was a proliferation of things to think about.
We decided to talk to the writers about this and have a workshop session. In this session the writers came up with the concept, “Knowledge is Power, Knowledge is Change.” It’s quite a wide subject this year, but very interesting nonetheless.
What was the journey like coming to this theme? What exactly does “Knowledge is Power, Knowledge is Change” mean?
I went into a room with all our writers, and asked everyone lots of questions. They did not call out their responses, rather they wrote their answers on bits of paper, which we then put up around the room on the walls, creating an enormous mind map. There were definite areas where we were thinking about the same thing. One of the common areas that became really apparent was the concept of power. It was largely the idea that people felt that power was not quite with us, that it was elsewhere and that we couldn’t change it. It was a lack of understanding where power was, and more widely a lack of understanding what to do about issues or even the ability to fully comprehend issues due to the vast amount of them.
I’d liken it to the kind of powerlessness of not being able to grasp anything in the face of constant news feeds, of 24-hour news, of buzzfeed, of the Internet. The feeling that there’s so much out there to consume and understand and try and take on, that it kind of lets you off the hook of trying to take responsibility for anything. Really, that is where it came from. They shaped their plays off the back of that workshop – we have some really interesting plays off the back of that. A lot of them have written about this sense of there being a lot of thing to take on board.
WHY IS the rights free aspect to the plays important?
At the beginning we had this sense that everybody wanted to say something, but just having a lot of people in a room watching wasn’t quite getting it out as much as we wanted. So, this idea of getting it out in as many places as possible was born. We’ve had 240 downloads this year – since the beginning we’ve had over 1000 or so in 24 countries. It’s pretty extraordinary. Rights free is an essential element of what we do – yes we’re theatre makers and make theatre on our own, but Theatre Uncut is about creating this incredible and weird sense of community that having people all over the world engaging with it has afforded us. It’s been a surprise really. We hoped we would have engagement, but the level of that engagement and the stories we hear have been beyond anything we imagined. It’s really taken on a life of its own.
What’s the best story you’ve heard of someone who’s performed a rights free play?
A bunch of people last year performed on a bus driving back and forth across the Mexican border – that was pretty amazing. We had an air force base in Japan – by a youth group. We’ve had some amazing stories – just this past week in Edinburgh we had some participants who performed in an old storefront and had people coming up and looking into the window at them. They were engaging people from a shop front – an extraordinary idea. People do all kinds of things with it – the writers are very brave because they release their plays out there and then they have no say as to what goes on. People do all sorts of things. People have done them on marches, in the streets – all kinds of innovative and imaginative ways to perform them. Getting pictures and reports back is really extraordinary for us.
What do you think about the relationship between theatre and politics – how do they work together?
Theatre is really the most basic form of empathy there is. Somebody stands in front of you and enacts something – they are right there – your empathy levels are at their most acute. Therefore, obviously, it’s an amazing vehicle for talking about anything sort of political, because it’s the act of engaging with something that is really specifically not you. On that level theatre is perfect for that. I’m not sure how far theatre can create direct political change, but we have politicians who come to our shows and have participants who said they weren’t thinking about politics before taking part in what we do. So, I think it’s an incredible way to talk about politics, to engage with it.
Do you think theatre, or art in general has a responsibility to be politically engaged?
I don’t think all art should be political. I think all art accidentally is political but I don’t think artists… it depends what sort of artist you are. Different artists have different reasons for doing what they do. Theatre, however, has a unique ability to talk about politics in a different way.
There’s a Q&A after the performance each evening. How do the audience come in to play in this section? What is the purpose of it?
It’s entirely about letting the audience talk back. We feel like the discussion element is super key. We didn’t want to be just chucking stuff in people’s faces. I feel like by fostering a discussion we allow those plays to take on a form of their own. The form the Q&A takes is a chair from one of the team, and then we have a number of panellists – a writer, a big thinker. We try to get political people, academics, because then it becomes not about the structure of the play, but about the issues that the play entails. Pretty quickly the audience begin to start talking amongst themselves and it turns into a big group discussion – the audience start telling us what they think.
For further information on Theatre Uncut visit their website here.
Book tickets for this week’s run at Soho Theatre here.
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