Carrie Cracknell and the Catch-22 of a directing career, experimental duo Emergency Chorus, and three shows to see.
Why are so many directors so disillusioned with the performing arts industry? Plus: the theatremakers behind Celebration and Landscape (1989), three show recommendations, and more.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
Below, you will find some thoughts on how hard it is to develop a directing career at the moment, prompted by the response to an interview I did with Carrie Cracknell published in The Stage last week. There is also a chat with Ben Kulvichit and Clara Potter-Sweet of experimental theatre company Emergency Chorus, and your regular show recommendations.
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Last Friday, an interview I did with the director Carrie Cracknell was published in The Stage, ahead of her revival of Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan at the Almeida Theatre.
One answer she gave particularly resonated with quite a few people. The question was: “What do you wish you could change about the performing arts?” And Cracknell’s answer was this:
“I wish there were more connected pathways for directors to emerge from small-scale fringe venues into the big venues. I feel like some of the pathways that were available to me and my peers are no longer there.”
That line made it into the headline of the interview and struck a chord on social media. I asked Cracknell to clarify what she meant, and although it did not end up in the published piece, I thought it would be worth sharing here for some context:
“I mean how you start off making your tiny show at the Gate Theatre or the Yard Theatre, and then how you are drawn up through mid-scale venues into large-scale venues. My sense is that that journey is not quite as clear now as it was. It feels harder for emerging directors to break through and make their mark.”
“I was really lucky to have the opportunity to run the Gate Theatre with Natalie [Abrahami, with whom Cracknell co-ran the venue 2007 to 2012]. We learnt so much there. It forced us to be bold and authorial, as we had to define the whole identity of the programme.”
“But there was also a really profound impact on my career from people like Graham Whybrow, who was literary manager at the Royal Court, and David Lan [former artistic director of the Young Vic], who saw everything we directed at the Gate then brought us both to the Young Vic to start working on a bigger scale.”
“Even working on a small scale at the Gate, we found there were these connected routes into the larger theatres. I’m not sure that they exist in the same way now.”
Cracknell is not alone in her concerns. Her comments come after director Rebecca Frecknall told The Stage about an ongoing exodus of directors from the industry due to “lack of stability, lack of financial grounding, and lack of prospects”, and after director Catriona MacLeod shared her frustration on Twitter at how many assistant directing jobs expected applicants with an impossible level of experience. Clearly, many directors are worried about the viability of their chosen career.
There are many early-career directors who find themselves in some cruel Catch-22 of being blocked from getting jobs because of a lack of experience, but simultaneously unable to earn that experience because they are blocked from getting jobs. And there are many established directors who have earned an impressive reputation through staging several successful shows but find it impossible to get work on bigger stages at bigger venues. And, lest we forget, all of them are paid pretty terribly.
There are, of course, several brilliant programmes that give a handful of directors a leg-up every year. The JMK Award provides early-career directors with the chance to stage a show at a mid-scale theatre: previous winners include Orla O’Loughlin, Roy Alexander Weise and Joe Hill-Gibbins, and 2023 winner Kalungi Ssebandeke is currently directing Mustapha Matura’s Meetings at the Orange Tree Theatre. The Regional Theatre Young Director Scheme posts promising directors to venues around the country, and its list of alumni reads like a who’s who of contemporary British theatre. These schemes are essentially competitions, though: they are highly competitive and only facilitate a few careers. An industry cannot rely on talent contests for professional development. Schemes like The JMK and the RTYDS are excellent, but they are sticking plasters in place of a conveyor belt.
It is tempting to lay all this at the door of the pandemic, and to an extent, that is valid. Post-covid, theatres continue to struggle financially. The result is that there are fewer shows, fewer risks taken, and fewer opportunities for everyone, including directors. The biggest difference between the era that Cracknell emerged in and now, after all is that back then theatres were comparatively flush. There was more to go around.
It is also tempting to say that this is simply how it is. The performing arts industry is pyramidal, just like every other industry. Lots of people enter the world of theatre wanting to work on its biggest stages but few ever get there. Just like most mechanics do not end up CEO of General Motors, most directors do not end up staging shows at the National Theatre. Just like most architects do not end up designing a skyscraper, most writers never have a play produced at the Royal Court. Get over it.
Ultimately, though, I think both of those positions misplace the disillusion felt by many directors, and the real root of the problem, which is not so much to do with the number of opportunities for professional development available - although that is obviously a huge concern - but the way in which those opportunities are accessed. Too often, the few chances to step up a rung on the career ladder either require directors to work for nothing to earn the requisite experience, or require them to know the person doing the hiring. Either way, the result is the same: the privileged few progress and the rest are left feeling frustrated. And an opaque, awkward situation like this will always be exacerbated in times of hardship, too, like those we are currently in, when venues become more risk-averse and less willing to take a punt on someone new.
Is there a solution? There is not an easy one, certainly. More transparency on the part of big theatres would be welcome: on that front, I really admire OpenHire, the scheme set up by directors Josh Roche and Derek Bond in 2020 that aims to change the culture of employment in the performing arts industry in general: it would be great if more organisations signed up to work with them. More formal and informal scrutiny of hiring processes would be good, too: most of these organisations are publicly funded, after all, and we should be able to understand exactly how that money is spent.
Ultimately - dare I say it - I think a lot of our industry leaders and artistic directors simply need to be better. It is easy to be generous in good times, when the coffers are full and failure is free. It is much more difficult to do so in hard times - but that is when it really matters. I think they need to cast nets wider, familiarise themselves with the work of directors they do not know, and take more risks. Otherwise, we are in danger of letting countless future Carrie Cracknells slip through the net.
The ideas of experimental performance makers Clara Potter-Sweet and Ben Kulvichit, who collaborate under the aegis Emergency Chorus, often take a roundabout route to reach the stage.
Take Landscape (1989), for example, the duo’s abstract show about environmental collapse, ecological regeneration, and mushrooms, which debuted in 2018, ran at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, and returns for several swansong stagings in Warwick, Nottingham, Bristol and Exeter over the next few months.
“We often start from a simple thought,” Potter-Sweet says. “With Landscape (1989), we started by wanting to make a show about endings. Our research led us down all sorts of interesting paths. It led us to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book The Mushroom At The End Of The World, which is about the matsutake mushroom, and the relationship between natural ecosystems and late-stage capitalism.”
Landscape (1989) eventually emerged as a sparsely staged, hour-long performance involving Potter-Sweet and Kulvichit acting out a series of repetitive rituals with mushrooms. They microwave mushrooms. They listen to mushrooms. They eat mushrooms. They discuss Czech composer Vaclav Halek’s mushroom-inspired music, Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay The End Of History, and the enormous Armillaria ostoyae specimen that sprawls over 3.7 square miles in Oregon, and is colloquially known as the “Humungous Fungus.” The Stage’s Natasha Tripney called it “meditative” and “entrancing.” Another critic called it “a tedious piece of pretentious nonsense.”
Potter-Sweet and Kulvichit know their wacky work is not for everyone. Kulvichit acknowledges that Emergency Chorus’ stuff is “difficult and experimental” and that he and Potter-Sweet consequently have no illusions about what their future career as collaborators will look like. “We talk quite a lot about our ambitions, and we don’t really have much interest in going big,” he says. “We only have one real ambition, which is to make small-scale, interdisciplinary work regularly and intimately.”
Kulvichit grew up in Bangkok in Thailand, got interested in theatre through school plays, then discovered “this weird world of live performance art” in his late teens. Potter-Sweet grew up seeing West End shows in London, and cites Rob Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s stage adaptation of 1984 as her lightbulb moment. The pair met while studying at Warwick University, and began making work together there with the producer Emily Davis. Their first show, Celebration, an exuberant experiment in evoking sheer joy, debuted in 2016, then ran at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017. In 2018, the year they made Landscape (1989), The Guardian’s Kate Wyver listed Emergency Chorus as one of the UK’s best young theatre companies, and it was made one of the New Diorama Theatre’s Graduate Companies.
Since then, Emergency Chorus has made a series of other works: some short and online, like 2021’s Sweetener, which played around with canned laughter; some long and in-person, like 2019’s durational performance Mr Jet exploring the relationship between ushers and their institutions. They make it all happen with scraps of funding snaffled from various arts organisations and funding bodies, the duo explain.
Potter-Sweet and Kulvichit cite Chicago-based performance pioneers Goat Island as a major formal influence, but also position themselves among a new generation of experimental theatremakers concerned with exploring and evoking feelings prompted by the prospect of environmental apocalypse. Interviewees of The Crush Bar Sam Ward, AKA YesYesNoNo, and Emma Clark and PJ Stanley, AKA emma+pj, belong in this camp, too. “We are the bleakest generation,” laughs Potter-Sweet. “Yeah,” agrees Kulvichit. “Some of our early stuff had a sincere and sentimental belief in hope, but we are much more pessimistic people now. We are not so interested in hope anymore.”
Today, Potter-Sweet and Kulvichit split their time between Bristol and London – both have regular jobs, and also freelance in various capacities with other theatremakers – and are preparing to premiere their third full show, Ways Of Knowing, at Camden People’s Theatre in late November. In typical Emergency Chorus style, it has had a convoluted route from conception to presentation.
“With Ways Of Knowing, we wanted to look at all the different methods and tools people have used for predicting and prophesying the future, from nineteenth-century weather forecasts that used leeches, to corporate trend forecasting, via oracles, mystics, anchorites and hermits,” Kulvichit says. “We went to a cave in the Mendips to experience complete darkness. We are including a lot of improvised dance and movement inspired by that journey into uncertain, alien territory. I won’t say too much about this but we have worked with the designer Blythe Brett and our regular collaborator Nat Norland to create set that has a living, structural, mechanical aspect to it. I guess, like with all of our work, we are just feeling out different ways of living in the world as it currently is.”
Landscape (1989) is at Warwick Arts Centre on November 1 and Nottingham’s Nonsuch Studios on November 2, then the Exeter Phoenix and Bristol’s Wardrobe Theatre in January. Ways Of Knowing is at Camden People’s Theatre from November 30 to December 2. You can find more info, and book tickets, via Emergency Chorus’ website.
Three shows to see next week.
Ghosts Of The Near Future - various, until December 1
Theatre-making duo Emma Clark and PJ Stanley - who operate as emma+pj - had a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2022 with this beautiful, bewildering show about mass extinction events, and how to navigate our feelings around them. You can read my four-star review of it here in The Stage, my interview with emma+pj in this newsletter from last November here, and book tickets for their tour - which started in Chichester last night, and visits the Barbican from Thursday to Saturday next week, before heading to Petersfield, Nottingham, Keswick and Edinburgh - via the button below.
Boy Parts - Soho Theatre, until November 25
Eliza Clark’s 2020 debut novel Boy Parts - a satirical psychological thriller set in the art world - was a huge hit, thanks largely to its viral success on BookTok. Now, it has been adapted into a one-woman play, written by Gillian Greer, directed by Sara Joyce, and starring Aimée Kelly. Both Greer and Joyce have had theatrical hits before - Greer with her plays Petals and Meat, Joyce with her stagings of Milly Thomas’ Dust and Sonya Kelly’s The Last Return. You can get tickets for Boy Parts via the button below.
Flip! - various, until November 25
Produced by company Fuel Theatre and Newcastle’s Alphabetti Theatre, Flip! is a new satire from writer Racheal Ofori and director Emily Aboud, which stars Leah St Luce and Jadesola Odunjo as Carleen and Crystal, two wannabee influencers seeking superstardom via a new social media app. It is Newcastle until October 28, then Edinburgh’s Summerhall and London’s Soho Theatre. You can read my interview with Aboud for Stage Directors UK here, and get tickets for Flip! via the button below.
Thanks for reading
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all, really - just reply to this newsletter or email me at fergusmorgan@hotmail.co.uk. Or you can find me on Twitter, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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See you next Friday.
Fergus