Interview with Teresa Heskins, January 2015
[Transcript corrected by Teresa Heskins, April 2016.]
Could you remind me when you were artistic director?
It was either about ninety-eight or ninety-nine. I think that it was the start of ninety-eight? Maybe not… Until I came here in October two thousand and six I think.
So where had you been before?
Oh I had been co-running a company called Jade Theatre that was a new writing and physical theatre company that was jointly based in London and Birmingham. But it was an independent company, it didn’t have a building or anything and it didn’t have regular funding and so we just did project funding and I did all sorts of free lance things and worked at Midlands Arts Centre with disaffected youth and quite a lot of other educational work and things like that.
Ok. And so when you got to Pentabus, was that the sort of work that they were doing? More community outreach sort of stuff?
They were doing, I think they did three, pretty much three shows a year. Which was a spring tour and an autumn tour to family audiences on the village hall touring circuit and they did a TIE piece in schools as well. And they did talk very much about being a company that did work for families. They didn’t talk about being a new writing company but one of the things that attracted me to it and that I noticed was almost all of the work that they did was new writing. So my plan in going there was to – I wouldn’t say ‘turn them into’, because I think that they were, although they didn’t articulate it, but to articulate that fact of being a company that commissions, develops and produces new writing. And I carried on pretty much doing that same pattern of work with them although it did evolve during the time that I was there.
One of the first things that we did, instead of doing a TIE show each year, was to refresh the educational work as a whole. And at that time the Arts Council had developed a policy of life long learning, so, instead of it being a strictly educational programme, we called it a lifelong learning programme and started to work with adults as well as young people. And we brought in an associate director to manage all that, and started to do things like online writing programmes, and things like that. It was quite early days for that kind of work really and so it was quite exciting to be doing that. Doing some national touring of shows for young people and working with young people in participatory programmes and things. And it was a much broader range of work really. And so that TIE touring pretty much stopped but a whole raft of other work started. But then we did carry on with that pattern of a tour to audiences going out in spring and autumn and there would be a new play. And there was also, recently begun, just before I came, was begun an element of site specific outdoor work and I continued doing that as well. And that often was something in summer, it didn’t happen every year, but every couple of years. One of the things that we found, I think actually partly because Shropshire County Council funded the company, but their funding was under pressure, and I think that the funding from them went pretty much, and the Arts Council had an amazing time (and amazing to remember now that it ever happened), I think it was in 2002 or 2001? They had rejuvenation and a refresh, and suddenly there was more money available for the arts. Sitting here now, I can’t believe that ever happened. But I can remember one day receiving the news that we would receive an uplift in our funding! For just doing well!
So, interestingly the combination for those two things changed the company quite a lot. So we started to work more nationally. We did a very particular piece of work where the National Theatre Studio gave us the opportunity to develop a piece of work which was called ‘Silent Engine’ [2002] by a writer called Julian Garner in their laboratory, and then allowed us to put on the publicity ‘developed in association with the National Theatre Studio’, and we took that to the Edinburgh Festival for the first time. And it was a real turning point for the company, that for the first time we were producing the work more widely and people were from outside the company and in London and across the country were talking about it very positively. And to be honest where it had the most impact was back at home, because I think that local people thought a little bit that it was that company of wastrels who were all long haired dope smoking hippies, and what were they doing, and being a little bit embarrassed about this theatre company on the farmyard in Bromfield. And I started to notice that people instead felt a sense of pride in what this company was doing in terms of putting Ludlow on the map (as if needed it, it was doing it brilliantly anyway), in terms of the rest of the country. And I suppose what we started to become was more a company that was about the voice of rural England rather than a company that was strictly for rural England. So we managed to do both, but we started to take these pieces of work where we would immerse a writer in that rural environment who might not know about it, but would observe it and get to know it and then write a piece about it and that piece might go out to audiences nationally. And I think that we coincided with a time when people were more interested in what was happening in rural England and feeling a little bit that there was a voice there that ought to be heard. And so we were able to become that voice a little bit.
When you toured nationally was that mainly to rural settings?
No, not always, no, Edinburgh and London and also other cities. And what we tended to do was do a piece on the national theatre touring circuit which tends to be towns and cities, doesn’t it?
But we would also either preview or afterwards do the piece in a village hall tour. So we did something called ‘White Open Spaces’ [2005-7] which was just before I came here which was one of my favourite pieces and we developed it with BBC radio drama and also with the Arvon Centre at Clun. We bought nine writers I think it was, out to stay there for a week and experience what it was like to live in the depths of the country. And it snowed on the first day and so they couldn’t get anywhere and the snow stayed there for the whole week, and it was amazing, and we had these amazing photos… Because the whole point of the project was to - I was taking a little bit overly seriously the Arts Council’s emphasis on diversity at the time and I felt that the word was often used as a euphemism to mean not White, and so I decided that it would be a project about diversity but that would mean art form as well as skin colour. So I invited nine culturally diverse, racially diverse writers who but also worked in different media. And so one was a film writer, two were performance poets and one was a travel writer and a radio playwright and a novelist. And I asked them to come and experience the countryside and write a play - a ten minute monologue - about what that world was like, and we took those ten minute monologues when they were done - I realised they were really exciting, and we took them to the Edinburgh festival. And the artistic director of the Soho Theatre came and saw them and to my surprise, because I thought it was a multi authored play about rural England, she said, ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘It is about what it is like to come from the city to rural England’. And I hadn’t noticed that, and how fascinating that it was both sides of that story. And so she wanted to produce them and the Soho, so they went there, and the BBC radio drama producers who had been part of the project pitched it and did it as a radio – Woman’s Hour series, and I think that it was after that that it did a tour of Shropshire and Herefordshire village halls and it went off to Sweden. But that was after I came here [New Vic Theatre] that it did those two things, so the associate director took it up and took the production off me. It was so exciting and it was such a lovely wonderful thing to do and I kind of - that way of making work is something that I still do now, and I am doing a project that is quite similar and some of the other stuff that I did with Pentabus and stuff that is still part of my work now.
It makes sense that people locally would feel a sense of pride if they felt that it was getting a national profile, but I suppose you might have expected the opposite?
I think that I did. ‘Why do they think that London is the be all and end all? Come down off your high horse!’ But people were so generous and excited about it….
Do you think that there was any loss in becoming less geographically constrained?
I don’t know. I am not sure that there was less work going on locally, after that, to be honest, partly because that is just when I left, so I am not sure, but probably the impact of it was greater because it wasn’t just a presence when you were out doing something, there was a more constant presence throughout the year. And I think also promoting the area to the world outside and it comes back to it in quite a lot of ways, doesn’t it?
One thing that I have been wondering about is how what goes on at Pentabus does or doesn’t reflect what is going on in theatre nationally or internationally…?
At Pentabus, I had felt that I was part of a very supportive and interested network of people who were passionate about new writing and so I would feel that the work that I was doing was important in the same context as, and was also fed in, and was fed by the work that the West Yorkshire Playhouse was doing, or what Paines Plough was doing or the Contact in Manchester, and so on. So I would often go to national conferences or seminars or meetings or first nights, and I would bump into people who I would call my new writing network, and that might include playwrights as well, or the kind of people that would run playwrighting awards or run script reading services and so on, and it was really clear when I got here that suddenly that sense of having tentacles all over the country and being part of a common group of people who care passionately about something no longer applied. So I think it is that; the new writing element.
What was the most ground breaking piece of theatre produced in your time?
I think that it was the one that I told you about actually: ‘White Open Spaces’. Because multi-authored pieces are quite rare anyway, aren’t they? And also working with writers from different genres is quite unusual and also that range of partners I think was unusual for Pentabus. I would say Pentabus was quite solipsistic in a way. And interestingly theatre has changed a lot now, certainly partnership and collaboration is one of the ways forward for a lot of theatres. But I think that apart from the collaboration at The National Theatre Studio, and collaborations with a theatre in Portugal and India which Steve Johnstone and Purvin led on, Pentabus had not really done much in the way of collaboration. So to collaborate with the Arvon Centre, and the BBC and then the collaboration with Soho from it, was quite unusual. It was published. I think that we had three plays published and that was unusual for us. And then it was the first piece of international touring that the company did with the British Council. So they had done international touring before - well, not touring but productions with the Portuguese and Indian companies, but this was the first British Council.
I have always felt that being on a British Council list means that you have arrived as an independent and exciting company and it is not the same as winning an Olivier award, but for an independent company it is a great thing to do. So yes. It felt wonderful. Unfortunately it felt like it just opened a wonderful door and then for me personally it opened a wonderful door, because I got offered this job. So just as there seemed to be a lovely exciting future for Pentabus, I was in a position of thinking, do I want to go?
I have in my mind that it went to Turkey too but actually I think that was another opportunity that I remember mourning over, sitting here in my office, I didn’t get to go to Turkey and I didn’t get to go Sweden, and I didn’t get to go to South Bank Show awards. I remember feeling very bitter about all three of those things in my lovely new job!
I think Turkey was a conference, I think that it was some kind of international conference but I can’t remember what, and the South Bank Show awards was the nomination that ‘White Open Spaces’ had for the Arts Council diversity award that the South Bank Show…
I remember that ‘White Open Spaces’ experience and how you could expose an audience to writers that would otherwise maybe wouldn’t attract them as an audience by packaging it up as a certain heading, and the heading for that one was: Is there apartheid in the countryside? as Trevor Phillips, the commissioner, head of commissioner for racial equality, I had heard saying that on the radio one morning – so I thought: let’s investigate it.
That is one of the other plays that I did at Pentabus that has really affected me which is the piece I did with Alecky Blythe – Strawberry Fields [2005], and I think we were the first company ever to commission Alecky Blythe, she told me many years after, we gave her her first real job! What a brilliant thing to be able to be a part of the trajectory of her career. How fantastic!
When you commissioned it you commissioned specifically as a verbatim theatre piece?
Yes, I did. I came into the office one morning and John Morton who was our development director, was ranting about this meeting that he had gone to and all this stuff that was happening in his village in Leominster and this strawberry field that had sprung up and all these Eastern European students had turned up and being terribly exploited and how the BNP had turned up at the meeting to discuss it, and he said what was wonderful was that he thought the BNP was there to spread sedition amongst these poor white people who didn’t want the Eastern Europeans there and actually they chased the BNP away! And he said at one point: ‘I shouldn’t be spending our time when we are meant to be working talking about what is happening back at home.’ And I said, ‘No, this is what we should be making work about and we are here to reflect the world that we are in!’ And we happened to be working at that time with a producer, she was managing our press and PR, actually, re-branding the company, Louise Chantal, and she said: ‘Have you heard about the piece that Alecky Blythe has been doing at The Arcola?’ And so she introduced us really and Alecky came up and sat on the bench outside the door, looking at the farmyard, entranced by it as everybody always is, and told me about the work that she did and showed me some of it, and I thought, that will be great, wouldn’t it? And so she spent a lot of time in Herefordshire in particular, interviewing the Eastern European students from the Ukraine and other places who were working on the strawberry farm; and she interviewed the manager of it and quite a lot of local people and the local press.