We’re proud of our multidisciplinary pedigree, and always enjoy working in the arts and culture sector. But it’s rare that we get the opportunity to feed directly into creative endeavours for our arts sector clients.
That’s why we were so excited to be asked by the National Theatre to help them devise a new play. Billed as a ‘listening project’, the piece’s aim was to explore and express some of the attitudes that lie behind Brexit – challenging the assumptions of an arts-going public who, for the most part, had been left feeling perplexed by the outcome of last year’s EU referendum.
We first worked with the NT a few years back – studying theatre-making in primary schools to inform the development of a new product. Recognising that the success of this new ‘verbatim’ drama rested on its team’s ability to find and gather representative, honest and objective narratives from around the country, the NT asked us to provide a series of training and analysis workshops to the play’s creative team of writers, directors and producers.
Over the course of several sessions, we took the team through the ‘research’ process – from how to recruit people to take part, to how to rigorously and objectively digest the findings to distil the ‘story’.
The end result of the process – a new production called ‘My Country: A Work in Progress’ – has its press night at the NT’s Dorfman Theatre tonight, and will soon be off on tour around the UK and to Holland.
Given our own commitment to getting beyond the bubble of big city thinking – studying people and places from across the UK – we’re proud to have played a small role in helping bring this show to life. We wish the whole creative team well with the rest of the endeavour.
