Barrel Organ Theatre is back, with a new purpose.
Barrel Organ Theatre is back, with a new purpose.
Co-directors Ali Pidsley, Rosie Gray and Ellie Claughton on the company's past, present and future.
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When Barrel Organ Theatre was first formed in 2014, it had loads of members. Eleven, to be precise.
Now, eight years and several acclaimed fringe shows later, there are only four core members: co-directors Ali Pidsley, Rosie Gray and Ellie Claughton, plus associate director Dan Hutton. As the company relaunches with a new focus post-pandemic, Gray explains that its evolution is due to a combination of factors.
“It’s a mixture of things,” she says. “The structure of the company has changed. People have gone off to do other things. One person has left theatre entirely and gone into education. One hosts our LIVE nights. Everyone is still involved, though. We have a founder members’ board with everyone that was there at the beginning on.”
Crucially, continues Gray, what makes Barrel Organ Barrel Organ – “a huge gaggle of people” making a “theatrically playful” production – is still present. What has changed since the company’s last show – Conspiracy, which ran at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe – is who the company is making those shows with.
Instead of producing work on their own, or with their friends and peers, Barrel Organ now collaborate with a variety of different groups, from students, to other artists, to people not previously involved in performance at all. It is a directional decision, Pidsley explains, that was precipitated by Covid-19.
“Spring 2020 forced everyone, including us, to stop and think, ‘What is the point of anything we do?’” he says. “We had never really interrogated that as a company. The pandemic forced the issue. We realised that we were all about collaboration and gameplay. That is our thing, and it is something we can pass on.”
“People were literally isolated from each other,” adds Claughton. “We had a way of working, and we felt like we had the skill sets to bring people together. That was online at first [Barrel Organ made a film, All Your Houses, with Guildhall students in 2021], but has now developed into various different projects and productions.”
What are those projects and productions? Well, Barrel Organ’s next show, an adaptation of Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, has been made with a company of performers between the ages of 16 and 22. It continues to curate LIVE, a scratch-night-cum-development-programme for underrepresented artists as well, and its Barrel Organ and Company mentorship scheme, run in partnership with the National Student Drama Festival, is now in its second year.
Then there is Town Squared, a new civic participation project that will see the company collaborate to make a show with the local community in a different medium-sized town every year. There is Campfire, another community project ran with Doncaster mental health charity MIND. There is Arthur, a show based on the King Arthur legend made with young people in Yorkshire, and there is an as-yet-untitled dance project created with Leeds-based collective ACCA Collab.
“Everything feels a lot more connected, now,” says Pidsley. “Before the pandemic, we were all freelance creatives in different fields, doing a variety of different things, some of which was connected to Barrel Organ, some of which wasn’t. Now, we are running a company. We are running an organisation that brings people together.”
“Everyone has to feel like they are part of the ensemble, part of the gang, making things happen…”
Like fellow fringe company Breach and a host of other increasingly influential theatremakers, Barrel Organ originated at Warwick University in the early 2010s. Its first show, 2014’s Nothing, was a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe. So, too, was its second show, Some People Talk About Violence, and its third, Anyone’s Guess How We Got Here.
From the outset, the company’s work was defined by its theatrical playfulness, a sly slipperiness that kept the audience on its toes. Nothing, for example, was a collection of monologues by Lulu Raczka that allowed its actors to say their lines whenever they wanted to, interrupting each other if they felt like it. In Some People Talk About Violence, another play by Raczka, the performers found out what parts they were playing via envelopes immediately before the show. That experimental, ensemble approach is still essential to everything the company does.
“We call it a blueprint,” Gray says. “The form of a show might feel free when it is performed, but it is underpinned by a structure and rules that you might not see as an audience member, just like a game is. The show might change from night to night, but the blueprint stays the same. Gameplay like that was massive for us when we started, and it still is.”
“Collaboration and gameplay has always what has been at the heart of a Barrel Organ show, both in the process of making it, and in the performance of it,” adds Pidsley. “Everyone has to feel like they are part of the ensemble, part of the gang, making things happen. The alternative is a really hierarchical idea of how art and creativity work. We aren’t like that at all.”
It’s that attitude to theatre-making that Gray, Pidsley and Claughton intend to share with as many different groups of people as possible. They all do other things as well – Gray acts, recently appearing in Igor Memic’s Old Bridge at the Bush Theatre; Pidsley directs, having assisted Ivo van Hove, Joe Hill-Gibbins, Samuel West and others; and Claughton is a senior producer with verbatim company LUNG Theatre – but, going forward, Barrel Organ is going to take up a lot more of their time. Hence the relaunch, explains Claughton.
“We wanted to be clear about the shift we have made from being a company that makes work collaboratively with our mates, to being a company that does that with other participants and artist development programmes,” she says. “We need to be a bit more open about the things we are doing so people can get involved with them. We are going to be making some fucking good work with some brilliant people, and we want to shout about it.”
What do you want to do?
We want to be able to keep doing what we are doing for the foreseeable future, and the unforeseeable future, too. We want Barrel Organ to exist well into the future, but, more importantly, we want the Barrel Organ ethos, the belief in collaborative, playful theatre-making to exist well into the future, too.
What support do you need to get there?
We need core funding, really. Previously, we have worked on a project-by-project basis. Now we are going to be operating as an organisation full-time, we need a stable base of support from which we can do that.
We are about to become a Charitable Incorporated Organisation, which will allow us to diversify our income streams, but it is still something we are battling with. It’s hard. How do you support other artists when you are struggling to support yourself?
How can people find out more about you?
We’ve got a new website up and running, where people can find out about everything we are up to. They can follow us on Twitter as well.
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Fergus Morgan