The importance of play (why I blinking loved working with On The Run)

So I've wanted to post something about devising for a while now. There are a few half baked posts in my drafts tray on the subject but now it feels about time:

Currently running at the Edinburgh Fringe right now is So It Goes, a play made by Hannah Moss and David Ralfe of On The Run Theatre. By 'of' I really mean 'who are entirely' and the reason I make this point is that So It Goes is doing astonishingly well, like big times. It's achieved 5 stars from the Times, Three Weeks and BroadWay Baby and 4 stars from pretty much everyone else. Working with Hannah and David has given me a new appreciation for the ability of On The Run (and many other companies like them) to put together a show and not only get it to the Fringe and do spectacularly well with it, but do it with the most skeletal of crew - Hannah and David are both devisors, performers & producers (and everything else that doing it by yourself makes you become) they have absolutely no financial or artistic backing other than crowd sourced budgets, the help of very talented friends and development space offered by venues they've volunteered at.

Photograph by Richard Davenport

The show has been in development for about two years. Devising theatre is a lengthy process, or ought to be if done correctly. Scratch performances definitely represent the solid foot holes used to propel yourself to performance ready and you also need the time to fail a bit to get better. The R&D for War Horse famously had actors running round the NT studio with cardboard boxes on their heads years before the show saw light. Good devised theatre takes time, and there is more devising out there than you think but in a country with a proud 500 year history of a writer headed pyramid it feels like the spherical model of collaborative work has a constant up hill struggle. It really is a location/history thing, a German techie recently said to me 'In Germany a writer is lucky if they turn up to the first night of their show and 4 sentences are the same as they'd written'. I'm not trying to spark an anti-writer revolution here, new writing is and absolutely should be championed, I'm simply highlighting the differences devising has against an established UK model, because looking at the route of growth for devised theatre in comparison, it is still very much the spring chicken of the group.

If you'd like some real time justification for my point, try popping 'new writing theatre' into google and see how many of the results are actual venues. Next, google 'devised theatre' and see how many of the results are instead companies and (more interestingly) degree courses.

Venues like New Diorama, The Pleasance,  CPT, The Farnham Maltings and the BAC mother ship are there for devising companies and I'm sure i've missed some regional equals off that list, but companies are still having to diversify to develop. The Guardian wrote this about a new way of R&D'ing shows - featuring Analogue (another-DIY-fringe-company-done-good) and their collaboration with Mountview which was used as a full scale research and development for their show Sleepless.

Research and Development (or 'Play') is one of the most integral parts of the process. Collaboration and Play is the site of the beautiful, wonderful, expansive open playing field of ideas, out of which comes the building blocks of the show. This photo is from the development from So It Goes. This is my (our) process from messing about in the R&D to the finished article.

Without this process it would have been a weaker show. I went into the final design stage knowing exactly how David and Hannah felt about the show, how they wanted the style of their piece to appear and what exactly was needed of me for the next stage. Without that process David and Hannah wouldn't have been able to effectively explore the visual potential of that moment, thus weakening it on stage and I would have come in with my own limited appreciation of their work and stamped my own interpretation on top of an immensely personal show, there is no guarantee I would have got it right.

Having the room to play is probably the most serious part of the process. It's importance for devising companies is paramount, it's necessity for designers and collaborators to be involved with is more vital than I feel I can get across in my most expressive of language. So that's why i'm banging on about how much On The Run has achieved. Because it's the same amount that SO many other devising companies have achieved at their own expense- and no this isn't an a post about the financial difficulties or potential solutions to the cost of supporting this kind of theatre - It's just one more voice to the chorus, one more attempt to tell anyone who didn't know but always wondered how the hell you do this lark and one more plea to venues thinking about artist development or companies thinking about how they make their work to value the whole process because it does pay off, it does work and you can make hugely successful achingly emotive, passionate and wonderfully comic theatre from scratch. You just need someone to give you the space and time to do it.