Theatre Design Lecture: Phyllida Lloyd

Summary

Highlights

• Phyllida Lloyd reflects on her theatre career and moments of learning and growth. 🌟
• The lecture celebrates the work of Jocelyn Herbert and her contributions to theatre design. 🎨
• Phyllida discusses the challenges and triumphs of staging diverse and inclusive plays. 👑
• Lloyd speaks passionately about the role of theatre in promoting social change and justice. ✊
• Her work in prison settings transforms both the performers and audiences, highlighting potential and humanity. 🚀

Key Takeaways

• Phyllida Lloyd honors the legacy of Jocelyn Herbert, emphasizing collaboration in theatre design. 🎭
• The lecture features Phyllida's reflections on creating inclusive and diverse theatre spaces. 🌍
• Phyllida shares her transformative experience with all-female Shakespeare productions in prisons. 📚
• Lloyd highlights the power of theatre to bridge societal divides and foster understanding. 🌈
• The importance of representation and giving a platform to the voiceless in the arts is emphasized. 🎤

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 04:00: Introduction and Background The lecture is part of a series dedicated to honoring theatre designer Justin Herbert. It is sponsored by the roots in Hopkins foundation in collaboration with the University of the Arts London and the National Theatre. The speaker, Eileen Hogan, is a professor at the University of the Arts and a trustee.
• 04:00 - 08:00: Jocelyn Herbert's Influence The chapter explores Jocelyn Herbert's influence on stage design and her connection to the Hopkins foundation.
• 08:00 - 12:00: Pericles Production Challenge The chapter 'Pericles Production Challenge' discusses the practice-based research led by Jocelyn, focusing particularly on a project with second-year undergraduate theater design students from Wimbledon. These students engaged with Jocelyn's archive, creating interpretations through drawings and documentation as an introduction to their future professional work. The chapter emphasizes the energetic and creative responses of these students as foundational elements in their career development.
• 12:00 - 18:00: Early Career and Theatre Space The chapter discusses the early career of Justin and his collaboration in theatre. It highlights an exhibition organized by students on the MA Curating and Collections Course at Chelsea College of Art. The exhibition explored Justin's work through films redesigned including 'If', 'Lucky Man', and 'Isadora'. The 2018 exhibition topic will focus on Justin's collaboration with Lindsay Anderson on David Storey's work.
• 18:00 - 24:00: Involvement in Opera This chapter delves into the involvement in opera, highlighting the work of Dr. Alan and Margolis. In her second year as a Jocelyn Herbert Research Fellow, funded by the Written Hopkins Foundation, she is embarking on a research and curation project in 2018. The project focuses on the significance of model boxes in theater design and exhibition, a theme that has emerged from extensive discussions around Johnson's archive. The endeavor is notably supported by generous funding.
• 24:00 - 32:00: Julius Caesar and Prison Concept The chapter discusses the appointment of a second Jocelyn Herbert research fellow through the Allenbury Trust, with plans to conduct interviews soon.
• 32:00 - 40:00: Impact of Prison Setting The chapter discusses the extensive experience of a prominent theatre professional who has worked in multiple esteemed venues such as the Royal Court and the National Theatre. Alongside her theatre work, she is also active in film and opera. The chapter highlights her profound impact on audiences, with memorable stage images that linger even after productions end. It mentions Dame Harriet water's notable roles, including Elizabeth in Philadelphia Stewart, and most recently, portraying Brutus Prospero and King.
• 40:00 - 50:00: Henry IV and Broader Mission The chapter titled 'Henry IV and Broader Mission' introduces Philippa, a key figure with a profound understanding of visual storytelling in theatre. The transcript highlights Philippa's ability to guide the audience's focus and narrates her natural talents in democratic collaboration with actors and designers. Her contributions to a Shakespeare trilogy showcase her insightful approach and collaborative spirit.
• 50:00 - 60:00: The Tempest and Culmination of the Trilogy This chapter focuses on a character described as a 'mainspring of ideas' who is open to others' contributions. Her unique wit and tone influence the narrative, and her designs and props are used thoughtfully to enhance the story rather than distract with style or gimmickry. The chapter highlights her approach to storytelling, which aligns with another character named Jocelyn, suggesting a thematic connection between the two.
• 60:00 - 65:00: Conclusion and Reflections In the chapter titled 'Conclusion and Reflections,' the speaker begins by expressing gratitude to Eileen and acknowledges the presence of Lenny Henry, suggesting a friendly and appreciative tone. The speaker humorously alludes to the importance of having jokes in a speech, specifically three, and launches into a light-hearted anecdote about theatre designers changing a light. This sets the stage for a reflective yet entertaining conclusion.

Theatre Design Lecture: Phyllida Lloyd Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 welcome to the 2017 lecture in honor of the theatre designer Justin Herbert's this is a seventh in our series of ten lectures sponsored by the roots in Hopkins foundation and run in an association between the University of the Arts London and the National Theatre I'm Eileen Hogan a professor of the University of the Arts and a trustee of
• 00:30 - 01:00 the roots in Hopkins foundation I was also lucky enough to know Jocelyn we're very pleased that the lecture this year is taking place while the exhibition for the Lynn berry prize the stage design is on if you haven't yet seen it it's in the Littleton lounge Johnson's archive is now part of the National Theatre Archive but it was previously housed at Wimbledon College of Arts and ul students continue to engage
• 01:00 - 01:30 energetically with the remarkable material that Jocelyn esque practice-based research takes many forms today for example I and colleagues have been with a group of second year undergraduate theater design students from Wimbledon who have made responses to drawings and documentation in Jostens archive and experimented representing their ideas as a preliminary taste of what they will do later in their careers and I think all these students are here
• 01:30 - 02:00 tonight I can't actually see them earlier in the year students on the Meo curating and collections course organized an exhibition at Chelsea College of Art which explored Justin's work through the film's redesigned including if lucky man and Isadora we've just confirmed that the topic for the 2018 exhibition by Chelsea's ma curating students will be Justin's collaboration with Lindsay Anderson on David stories
• 02:00 - 02:30 plays dr. Alan and Margolis is in her second year as a Jocelyn Herbert Research Fellow also funded by the written Hopkins foundation in 2018 she will be researching and curating an exhibition he the national focus on the role of model boxes in theater design and exhibition which has grown largely from discussions centered on Johnson's archive I'm very pleased to that with a generous support
• 02:30 - 03:00 of allenbury trust we were able to appoint a second Jocelyn Herbert research fellow and we'll be interviewing candidates shortly and a note for 2018 there is the designer bill Dudley will given next Johnson herb a lecture on the 15th of February in the Littleton and this will coincide with his own retrospective exhibition here at the National tonight though we have the great provisional privilege of listening to the director fellow Deleuze lecture
• 03:00 - 03:30 taking the space she's worked in many many spaces and like Jocelyn they include the Royal Court and the National Theatre and again like Jocelyn she works in film and opera as well as theater the images on Philotas stages live long in the mind and after the productions vanish Dame Harriet water played Elizabeth in Philadelphia Stewart and most recently Brutus Prospero and King
• 03:30 - 04:00 Henry in the dawn Mars all film our Shakespeare trilogy I asked Harriet how I should introduce Phil edition eyes and this is what she wrote Philippa deeply understands the purpose of the visual and theatre she has an unerring eye so where the audience needs to look and what they need to look at in order to tell the story she has a natural Democrat and collaborator with actors and designers she is usually the
• 04:00 - 04:30 mainspring of ideas but is open and accepting of others she feeds in her own witty take and tone but design and props are always about the story never about gimmickry or style for style Sade the last phrase could have been said by Jocelyn it matches her approach so perfectly welcome
• 04:30 - 05:00 good evening Thank You Eileen so much and thank you for asking me I feel very honored to be here tonight Lenny Henry has who's here somewhere has told me that I'll be fine as long as I have three jokes so how many theatre designers does it take to change a light
• 05:00 - 05:30 bulb I'm not changing a thing I feel this joke would have been roundly and wryly refuted by Jocelyn Herbert who was a quite other kind of collaborative artist and it is for collaborations that I want to thank all the theatre designers of sets costume and lighting who have inspired me how to work and how to live over the years in particular
• 05:30 - 06:00 Anthony Ward Marc Thompson Richard Hudson and Bonnie Christie all of them I know walk along paths that have been cleared that have been decluttered of fuss as Jocelyn might have called it the debt that we all owe to her is great now the last time I made a speech on this stage was 25 years ago when I met my nemesis with a production of Shakespeare's
• 06:00 - 06:30 Pericles I can still remember the night of the first preview with a giant hydraulic revolve stuck at an angle of 45 degrees here on the stage behind me with a thousand people out here wondering what the hell was going on I had arrived in flight from the RSC where my friend Katie Mitchell and I had been invited to run the other place theater
• 06:30 - 07:00 we had asked if we could have an independent company of actors to be able to bring more women and diverse performers to the RSC and when we were told that this wouldn't be possible I blindly dived at Richard Aires offer to work on this most changing of stages I dreamt that everything I was failing to do at the RSC to realize my mission to make a plea
• 07:00 - 07:30 for tolerance of the audience by reflecting the world outside on the stage I thought I could do that here and I set out to bring the others who at that time would have struggled to get an audition at the RSC afro-caribbean actors Chinese African actors Spanish dancers and the astonishing Katherine hunter I set out to create a genuinely
• 07:30 - 08:00 diverse and spectacular piece of work but failed to arrive at a production design that I could make evolve with my rehearsals my friend marc thompson and i had presented our designs as we were bound to do in an organization of this size some time before our rehearsals began it was like having precisely worked out the route for a sea voyage
• 08:00 - 08:30 and having absolutely no plan for unexpected weather by the time the mysteries of the play began to emerge in the rehearsal room and the work had caught fire through improvisation discussion song and dance we had sailed at very great speed in a quite other direction we were in a strange country wearing all the wrong
• 08:30 - 09:00 clothes the moment we hit the stage It was as if I'd taken a group of people who had come brimming with excitement out of the rehearsal room after a final run-through and I had forced them back down the neck of a bottle crying for breath It was as if the physical production had landed on them rather than being born through them we hadn't answered that fundamental question who are we and why are we here it was the
• 09:00 - 09:30 most uncomfortable experience of my working life it felt in that moment as if the gap between everything I felt about the world and the process of making theater was so far apart they could literally never be reconciled I had failed and it wasn't until 25 years later when a number of women had for the
• 09:30 - 10:00 very first time taken over certain significant London theatres that I was given the chance with Shakespeare to at last match the space with the mission with time now after a few years of making plays in upstairs rooms of pubs my formal relationship with theatre space began in my 20s when I had a four-year apprenticeship directing on
• 10:00 - 10:30 proscenium arch stages together with the designer and the composer Garry ocean the designer Antony Ward and the composer Garry ocean we exalted in our stay at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre in the late 1980s and here is Anthony's model box for our very first production which was shakespeare's comedy of errors Bristol was like the little toy theater
• 10:30 - 11:00 of our childhood and not unlike the so perfectly proportioned royal court that Jocelyn Herbert had painted so that the audience and the actors felt as if they were all in one room we played with all the tricks there were we played with flying with trap doors with the wonders of perspective we learnt how walking from stage left to stage right going
• 11:00 - 11:30 against the reading line felt more like walking uphill for an audience we learnt about the power of an upstage centre entrance we learnt about rakes and revolves now I could see and begin to see how the stage design delighted awed frightened mystified how it did or didn't release the play I hurled myself at my work it
• 11:30 - 12:00 was named me the play and show me the stage that some a streetcar named desire with Eleanor David and Bob pew in one two-year period I directed 12 productions and then in 1989 I got a scholarship to Russia and Georgia to go and watch great Russian and Georgian directors in rehearsal that's my photo taken at melikhovo where Chekhov wrote
• 12:00 - 12:30 the seagull and that's Chekhov's bedroom one company we met had been in rehearsal for the same play for a year when I told a great Georgian director how many plays I'd notched up he said that should never have been allowed to happen you should have taken more time to direct fewer plays so trying to make more time to slow down time was the next phase of my
• 12:30 - 13:00 journey and then in 1990 I went as an associate director to the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester in the round now I felt as if stepping into that space for the first time I had that had the feeling that this was modern theatre and yet it was so ancient it predated even the 5th century BC space on which this
• 13:00 - 13:30 theatre is based because it's it's the village green it's the market square it's gather round children and let me tell you a story everything I'd learned in the past four years was upturned I learnt how standing in the centre of the circle you felt utterly vulnerable how you could as an actor only really command the space from the edge I learnt how the design of the floor became
• 13:30 - 14:00 all-important how objects carried into the space props became extra powerful how the rest of the audience became the walls how suddenly we were implicated we were holding the action between us and when that essential disturbance came in the action the one we all strive for as theater makers to make every person in the audience feel are we going to get
• 14:00 - 14:30 through this what is gonna happen we all felt it I directed Medea that's Claire Benedict there on Antony's slate floor and I saw how the confrontation between Medea and Jason was completely direct there was no facing the actor across the stage but sort of half keeping an eye on you guys at the same time the audience were judge
• 14:30 - 15:00 and jury we were implicated I saw how the space killed plays with sofas but released Shakespeare's writing and when poor liner at the climax of our production of The Winter's Tale said it is required you do awake your faith you could feel the audience literally leaned forward as if to say we can help we can do this and then one day
• 15:00 - 15:30 I was asked to work in opera now that was a club I never thought I would be invited to join it's often said that the most important contribution that theatre design can make to a production of an opera is to facilitate the getting of the chorus on an offstage and it is a telltale sign when you see a log jam of a queue a prompt corner as if it's last orders at the canteen now there are all
• 15:30 - 16:00 kinds of reasons not to work in opera there is never enough technical time to put your work onstage and proper rehearsal time in star lead international opera well it's just not regarded as essential and working with the chorus can be like trying to direct your family as for the sexual politics well it's a close runner-up to Hollywood and try getting
• 16:00 - 16:30 some diversity into Billy but there's only one opera I've ever worked on which passes the Bechdel test that's the one where you have to have a scene in which two women are talking about something else other than a man and that's the dialogue of the Carmelites which is about nuns and that's that's assuming you don't count Jesus as the love interest that's the second joke and the
• 16:30 - 17:00 relationship between the audience and the stage is such a rigid thing you're they're the pits there and the action is there I mean how do you prevent the audience from being lulled into thinking of their next meal how do you how do you bring the action and the audience all into one room how do you create that essential disturbance that an audience must have felt when they first heard
• 17:00 - 17:30 Carmen which caused such an outrage that it virtually killed bees eh how did you create that extreme tension without stopping the music or re scoring Don Giovanni for an all-female cast both of these things must be done and repeatedly after the events of last week incidentally Don Giovanni will never be the same again
• 17:30 - 18:00 opera is also a medium that when the stars all aligned can reach parts of an audience that other art forms struggle to do when a great chorus intimately rehearsed over a really good amount of time bypasses an audience intellect and really makes it feel where you strive to put all audiences close to the fire and the other thing it off to a director and designer because opera
• 18:00 - 18:30 productions can be planned long in advance is time time to make pilgrimages of all kinds to forage for all those supplies you're going to need for the journey journeys in books galleries houses landscapes talking Dreaming eating drinking fighting that essential journey that amasses everything and then
• 18:30 - 19:00 reduces it down to virtually nothing I've had the good fortune to work with opera north that's their production or my productions there of Peter Grimes and they really do understand the value of time preparation time rehearsal time and then time to evolve your production at a critical moment when Antony and I were wrestling with our design for Benjamin
• 19:00 - 19:30 Britten's Gloriana that's Josephine Barstow who's playing here tonight probably she can hear me backstage um in Foley's if anyone's seen her scene that wonderful production and her in it and we had the good fortune to work on this production of Gloriana over ten years at a time when everything but the kitchen sink was in Antony's model box when the challenge to realise balls cows ting pageantry rebellion on a we
• 19:30 - 20:00 thought very small budget seemed completely impossible we did the thing that sometimes brings light to the end of the tunnel we left the country to go to the theatre now most of my shifts in thinking have about theatre have come over the years from seeing work from outside these shores I've heard the some students in the audience please take any opportunity you can to see work from far
• 20:00 - 20:30 away better still travel to see it so in 1991 Antony and I went to Paris to the munitions Factory in the woods of Vincennes to see the work of Aryan manoosh kin the design began a long time before the play in one production the audience were all eating bowls of special rice together in the
• 20:30 - 21:00 foyer a that would prepare them for a journey into the killing fields of Cambodia and then for her version of the Oresteia Laser feed we entered the foyer and we found first what looked like row upon row upon row of actors at dimly lit tables under the bleachers transforming themselves into Asian warriors and then we were staring down into what looked
• 21:00 - 21:30 like an archaeological dig a long pit filled with life-size ancient statues and horses as if the excavations on the text had begun long before we arrived it was a totality of vision mission space and time and all this before we'd even entered the auditorium the design was implicating us from the moment we stepped over the threshold and
• 21:30 - 22:00 inside the theater the entire epic action designed by geek Lord force wha took place in a human scale corralled pen like some sporting arena or a kind of bullring no flying no traps no moving scenery just one upstage center entrance we were all in the room and all at once the clutter of our Gloriana boiled down to this simple performance arena a human
• 22:00 - 22:30 scaled pen from which the eyes of the world could peer at the desolate and morally conflicted Queen Elizabeth the first it held within it the public and the private it was one of the simplest sets we'd ever created for the most visually lavish production we ever made and it's set us on a path to the
• 22:30 - 23:00 dialogue of the Carmelites which in turn was to inspire mark Thompson's design for our production of Mamma Mia in the West End and then to Peter Grimes with Antony and Mary Stuart at the Donmar and all of these productions took place in simple rooms in which the human body and the changing light created the disturbance so 25 years or 20 years actually after Pericles I thought that I
• 23:00 - 23:30 had learned quite a good deal about space the right play for the right space and I'd learned to turn down any jobs that didn't offer time to prepare time to rehearse but what of my mission the plea for tolerance the putting of the world on the stage hither and thither I knew that I was making some women in the audience feel at least included but I
• 23:30 - 24:00 was still wrestling with the lack of diversity on our stages especially in Opera the lack of young people in our audiences almost everywhere and the inflexibility of our theatre spaces so when in 2012 a report came out saying that there were two men for every woman working in British theatre and two friends of mine Josie Roark and Cate Pakenham had got
• 24:00 - 24:30 their hands on the keys of the Donmar Warehouse and asked me to be in their opening season I proposed to them an all-female production of a Shakespeare and it was the start of a five-year journey that took us three times across the Atlantic and climax in our building our own theatre to perform a trilogy of plays at Kings Cross I went to talk to
• 24:30 - 25:00 my dear and brilliant friend Harriet Walter who there she is who had apart from the odd Volumnia in Coriolanus or paulina in The Winter's Tale really she'd run out of road in the classical repertoire and I said to her what are you good casting for and she said Macbeth Thunderbolt and she said also Brutus in Julius Caesar I
• 25:00 - 25:30 probably got more in common with Brutus than I ever had with Cleopatra that she just played so we chose Julius Caesar Shakespeare's one of his most macho plays by performing it with women almost all of them would be freed from their habitual romantic or domestic sphere they would be forced to occupy the whole stage I decided to set Caesar in a
• 25:30 - 26:00 women's prison I thought it would help the audience and the actors believe the action of the play and in prison uniform they immediately became androgynous the limitations this decision placed on the design would have become absolutely fundamental to every detail of the process over the next five years together with Harriet and Bonnie Christie our designer we went into
• 26:00 - 26:30 Holloway prison and getting into prison if you haven't committed a crime with art or culture is scandalously hard something our Ministry of Justice must surely look sue if they truly believe in rehabilitation we ask the prisoners what they thought of Julius Caesar these women with their obsession with freedom and justice their apprehension of danger
• 26:30 - 27:00 their superstitions they regarded the choice of Julius Caesar as I quote highly suitable the first thing we felt was the absolute horror of being locked in the sound and sight of keys in the lock and the second thing we became aware of was the instable of the space a disturbance might occur at any moment to threaten the group of
• 27:00 - 27:30 us or the landmass on which we were standing one day a prisoner was having a go at Mark Antony's famous oration and out of the corner of my eye I suddenly saw moving inexorably towards her a slow-moving industrial polisher propelled by a cleaner a prisoner who was actually on a cleaning module and the group watching Mark Antony were they were enraged they were shouting out no
• 27:30 - 28:00 back back but no the Hoover moved on and it was Mark Antony who had to give way and then suddenly with the jangling of keys a door would open officers would enter the room to whisk one women off to court another out for her medication and a third to be transferred to the north of England the performance was never ever safe we never knew whether we would get through a session or even have anywhere to do it in the first place every time we sat down to work we felt
• 28:00 - 28:30 tense it made us think about our theater spaces the ones we've created and how the action we put on them so often leaves us at our ease and not implicated in any way now the group of actors I brought together in their ill-fitting uniforms were a disturbance in themselves to some received notion of nobility majesty and power
• 28:30 - 29:00 apparently ill-equipped to serve up the crown jewels of our dramatic literature they were the wrong gender they were the wrong class the wrong color the wrong nationality they were the others they were to represent the voiceless in our culture several of them had never done Shakespeare before but what they did share was a brilliant and despite the
• 29:00 - 29:30 lack of conventional education of some of them an instinctive of how to close the gap between themselves and Shakespeare's language to make his language their own we joined forces with clean break a company who work with female ex-offenders and they use theatre as a tool for rehabilitation I cast two of their members Carey rock and Jen Joseph and Jen there in the
• 29:30 - 30:00 dayglo who had been in prison was to become a core member of the company helping us create an authentic prison world and to build up prison characters with our brilliant movement director and ye we set about creating a world of men the first thing we noticed was how men owned the place how they take up the
• 30:00 - 30:30 space at home on the tube in the workplace actresses described how even when they were playing leading roles they only felt entitled to take up a very small portion of the room we noticed how men kept their voices centered when they spoke and they didn't move their hands when they spoke they didn't stand obliquely when they were negotiating
• 30:30 - 31:00 they were direct we decided we wouldn't try to be men we would try to stop doing the things that made the audience realize we were women and when we first heard Karolina Valdes as sinner The Conspirator cry out liberty freedom tyranny is dead there was an electricity round the rehearsal room table how many
• 31:00 - 31:30 times had a woman expressed such words on an English stage when we opened audiences who were really familiar with the play said they were literally hearing the text they were hearing completely new things in it it was like hearing a familiar score played on unfamiliar instruments and young people especially came forward and said it was changing what they saw as possibilities for them not just on stage
• 31:30 - 32:00 but in the world at the end of a three day workshop at the Donmar a Bangladeshi girl from Tower Hamlets who was 14 years old who took up so little space that her teachers had not even heard her speak once she walked out onto the Donmar stage and with outstretched arms she said in a commanding voice I am the
• 32:00 - 32:30 Prime Minister by the time we began planning our second production Henry the fourth the prison was not just a framing device for our play it had become fundamental to what was for everyone involved an out-and-out mission we'd begun to learn about women in prison that only 14% are in for violent crimes that 49% associate drug use with their
• 32:30 - 33:00 offending that 53% have experienced physical or sexual abuse in childhood that 40% of women who go into prison lose their homes and a substantial portion of them lose their children too so now we felt that our prison and characters were in fact real people whose stories we were carrying on to the stage we were bearing witness to these lives our mission was not just feminist
• 33:00 - 33:30 it was about class gender diversity who feels voiceless in our society who is outside the space at the start of the journey bonny Christie had stripped out all the seats in the Donmar and created a room in a prison the only things allowed inside the room were the things you would be allowed inside when Eve nothing
• 33:30 - 34:00 every single little thing takes on a mighty significance one woman we met had made herself a shrine out of empty shampoo bottles another had made a lampshade out of J cloths another because you're only allowed one blanket and it gets very cold in that time in the autumn before they turn on the heating she had asked her father to send her scarf kits she'd knitted them all together and made herself a second
• 34:00 - 34:30 blanket because we were in prison we couldn't use anything that might constitute a weapon we asked them so how we going to murder Caesar then well what about throwing boiling water in his face and then pouring bleach down his throat we used water pistols for guns and very very flimsy rubber daggers but when a deathblow was given in the fight scene
• 34:30 - 35:00 in st. Anne's warehouse in Brooklyn 400 tough-looking state school kids literally gasped in shock nothing about it was real but they couldn't help believing it was our very frailty our apparent shortcomings the gap between who we were as people and the Dukes princes and kings we were playing seemed to inspire the audience almost as if they were filling in the gaps for us and
• 35:00 - 35:30 I realized that I had sometimes in the past not left enough for the audience to do I had drowned the action in stuff after all it's only very lately that Shakespeare has been began to be performed in period costume in the 16th 17th and 18th centuries it was modern dress for the audience with just a vestige of maybe Roman armor or a medieval crown we felt we might be getting closer to something truly
• 35:30 - 36:00 Shakespearean every Tuesday night thanks to extremely brave an extremely brave governor and staff we had a live audio link from our rehearsal room at the Donmar to a prison drama group in Yorkshire we would read a scene and we'd say what is going on here and they would say well the Earl of
• 36:00 - 36:30 Northumberland feels guilty he is converting his guilt into rage and violence I mean that's what happens from these women so voiceless and with so little formal training in our field we learnt so much because they had lived literally Shakespearean lives loss abandonment betrayal loyalty murder honour goodness they knew honor because
• 36:30 - 37:00 when you've lost everything honor is about all you do have left the five-year journey remained in a constant state of incompletion and the design evolved and expanded with our experience on our first trip to New York we began to think about how to expand the audience's journey to begin at the threshold as this step from the street they were
• 37:00 - 37:30 locked into a gigantic concrete loading bay and briefed by prison officers on the rules of the secure facility in America we grew with the energy and scale of the city all my instinct was now telling me that the social political spiritual mission of the project prompted a next step into the round it would make the actors vulnerable and the
• 37:30 - 38:00 audience would be implicated at the Donmar the prisoners had led into the room and they faced us as I'm facing you now in a lineup they confronted us some with shame some with fury and power and what we felt as an audience was ours to keep as a secret now on our second to New York bonny Christie created a giant cage like an indoor basketball
• 38:00 - 38:30 court in which we were all seated and the prisoners entered the space in a fragile line their vulnerability and shame manifest the audience staring at them from all sides and what we as an audience felt about it was on show - we were voyeurs of the action and each other by 2016 we had a third play and it was one we knew from our prison research
• 38:30 - 39:00 would speak loudly in a prison setting The Tempest now the play concerns revenge and forgiveness the burden of the past the insubstantiality of all things being thrown into prison is a tempest the prison is an island and you feel you've been shipwrecked on it you've lost your friends and your family
• 39:00 - 39:30 and the island feels indeed full of noises you've nothing left but your troubles dreams you spend the time in that world of the imagination so we asked how'd you do magic in prison well you imagine you're invisible you literally disappear here what do you dream of then hmm a fluffy towel putting
• 39:30 - 40:00 my children to bed the freedom of a green lane by now we knew who we were and why we were performing these plays we knew the value of even under strict guard being allowed to take the space for just two hours having a voice for just two hours we imagined the play as a reconstruction a group of prisoners a group of prisoners help one prisoner come to terms with their loss with their
• 40:00 - 40:30 anger with their relationship with a child left on the outside we found out from the but sometimes they would rehearse something that they wanted to say to their child on a visit they would use another prisoner to practice the words so now we had a trilogy of plays to perform in one day we had burst out of the Donmar and kate Pakenham and her
• 40:30 - 41:00 team had found a society and built us a theater a pop-up venue outside Kings Cross station Bonnie Christi and Chloe Lampard designed every beat of the audience experience from the street everything we done over five years in pieces was now brought into a whole the audience were drinking Prosecco in the very cool bar through which the audience and through
• 41:00 - 41:30 which the prisoners were frog-marched by officers and then the audience moved into a secure briefing corridor of the prison and finally to the big sporting arena made secure for the performance and thanks to an initiative from the Donmar to give away 25% of the tickets free to under 25 year olds the demographic of the audience changed to
• 41:30 - 42:00 reflect the world of the stage our museums are free our libraries are free now how about our theatres Harriet was to play Brutus Henry the fourth and Prospero all in one day which as my nephew said cannot have been done before even by a man it's all downhill from now the sporting arena that bunny created
• 42:00 - 42:30 for the performance made the audience not just judges and jurors but senators wedding guests waiting armies and at the climax of The Tempest elves shining the torches that they found under their seats into the space we were witnesses we were implicate did our faith was palpably required the project set out to give more jobs to
• 42:30 - 43:00 women and became a mission to give hope and inspiration to anyone who might feel they had no voice in our culture we wanted to challenge assumptions what does a leader look like or sound like what does a lover look like or a wife or a warrior in life a wife can be taller than her husband but less so on stage and screen in Shakespeare a woman can be gently funny but might she be grossly
• 43:00 - 43:30 funny does Falstaff have to be posh does the fact that 75 percent of the people on stage are not white mean this is not England since we began the project there had been great changes in the world everywhere there was talk of threat from the others from the outsiders or as Shakespeare would call them strangers to our shores in Europe and across the
• 43:30 - 44:00 Atlantic we had voted to leave Europe and America had voted in a president wanting to build a wall to keep out the others division seemed everywhere yet our journey had been the opposite one thanks to the genius of Shakespeare and the trust of these women behind bars we had come to feel not less connected to others but much so much more not afraid
• 44:00 - 44:30 of strangers but less we had stopped striving to so hard to define the differences between us and through these plays come to appreciate our common humanity we were taking the space not as men or women but as Harriet said when she played Prospero just as humans the project was defined by the belief that the way we work is as important as
• 44:30 - 45:00 influential the work itself the best ideas might come from the actor who left drama school yesterday or the prisoner serving a life sentence it saw actors relinquish their vanity and subsumed their egos to the good of the group it saw designers collaborating with other designers producers who never said
• 45:00 - 45:30 no and encouraged us courage Duss to think bigger wider and further prison governors who despite the risk to their reputations opened their gates to us and prisoners who trusted us with their stories what had started as a production had through the greatest gift to artists time been allowed to cohere as a mission
• 45:30 - 46:00 it was a ship that went on sailing the voyage is by no means complete thank you so much [Applause]