Georgie Bailey has co-founded a festival - among other things.
The co-artistic director of ChewBoy Productions on his company's ethos, its upcoming ChewFest, and its Edinburgh Fringe show. PLUS: Don't miss Different Theatre's three shows at Brighton Fringe.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
Each issue features an interview with an exciting, emerging theatremaker - and gives them a chance to be explicit about where they want to go and what help they need to get there. Maybe you, reader, can give it to them, or put them in touch with someone who can.
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Before this week’s interview, I want to mention award-winning, Sussex-based company Different Theatre, and the three shows it is presenting at Brighton Fringe later this month.
First up is Clean! The Musical, returning after winning the Outstanding Theatre Award at last year’s festival. Written by Different Theatre’s artistic director Sam Chittenden, with a score from composer Simon Scardanelli, this rousing, five-star, feminist show tells the 150-year history of the women of Brighton’s Laundry Hill. It’s on from May 20-22.
Next is The Last, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man – a remarkably relevant dystopia, written by Shelley after the death of her husband and featuring a mysterious illness sweeping across the globe. This one-woman version is created by Chittenden and performed by acclaimed actor Amy Kidd. It’s on from May 26-27.
Lastly, there is The Little Prince. Also written by Chittenden and Scardanelli, this musical adaptation of French author and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s much-loved children’s novella of the same name is a magical and moving 90-minute show for all the family. It’s on from May 31 – June 1, then again on June 4.
Tickets for all three shows can be booked via the Brighton Fringe website, and all three are available for touring. More info and contact details can be found on Different Theatre’s website.
There is a lot going on for writer and producer Georgie Bailey and his multi-arts company ChewBoy Productions at the moment. A lot.
DJ Bazzer’s Year 6 Disco, a solo show written by Bailey and performed by Jack Sunderland, just finished a short tour. The inaugural edition of ChewFest, a festival of work by emerging artists created and curated by ChewBoy Productions, opens in just over a week. And Caligari, a five-man musical adaptation of 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, will be running at the Edinburgh Fringe in August.
On top of all that, Bailey is busy as literary projects manager for London Playwrights Workshop, as a producer and facilitator for a variety of performing arts organisations, and, until recently, as a marketing assistant for Edinburgh-based publisher Salamander Street. All among, impossibly, other things. Life has been quite hectic for Bailey lately.
“Last year was really tough,” he says. “I was working for a lot of different people, doing a lot of different things. That is what it is like when you are freelance, though. It is hard to take days off. It is hard to call in sick. It is hard to say no to things. I’ll be honest, I was totally burnt out. It’s only recently that I’ve got back to a good place, mentally.”
At present, Bailey is focussed on ChewBoy Productions. The company has a core team of five – writer and producer Bailey, actor and filmmaker Hal Darling, director Lucy Betts, assistant director Selwyn Hulme-Teague, and technical manager Chloe Stally-Gibson. Their modus operandi, though, is to bring in different emerging artists and theatremakers to collaborate on every project.
“The five of us are mission control, and we work with a lot of different people,” he says. “Our ethos is basically that early-career artists can learn from us, and we can learn from other early-career artists, and we all get the opportunity to create new work. It is great because maintains that feeling you had with your first and second shows. It maintains that excitement.”
The first ChewFest, for example, will see ChewBoy Productions invite a range of young companies and emerging artists to present work at The Lion and Unicorn Theatre in Kentish Town – where the company is an associate – for six days from May 23. It was partly inspired, Bailey says, by the bad experiences he has had when performing at other festivals.
“We have had some very negative experiences at some festivals over the years. The most common problem is a lack of communication about anything and everything, no matter how much you email. We wanted ChewFest to be different. We wanted to get to know the people involved, offer them support, and make them feel like they are part of something bigger.”
“Live audiences are the one thing theatre has above other mediums, so why would you ignore them?”
Bailey was born in 1998 and grew up in Bordon, Hampshire. “I just mucked about as a kid,” he says. “I never had any interest in theatre until I was 16 or so. I was always interested in stories, though. I wrote short stories when I was about eight, and me and my brother would sit our parents down and act out little skits for them.”
His grandmother took him to shows occasionally, though, and it was seeing Nick Payne’s The Same Deep Water As Me at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013 that ignited his theatrical ambitions. “I dropped out of my GCSE in IT and switched to drama,” Bailey remembers. “Originally, I wanted to act, but as I got older and self-doubt crept in, I realised I preferred the writing and producing side of things.”
School drama led to working with the Yvonne Arnaud Youth Theatre in Guildford, which in turn led to three years at Chichester Festival Theatre, first as an apprentice, then as a marketing officer. It was there that he met Hal Darling, with whom he founded ChewBoy Productions in 2018, and with whom he wrote, produced and performed the company’s first show Euan, an abstract riff on Waiting For Godot. After that, explains Bailie, everything was a bit of a whirlwind.
He took part in numerous writer development programmes, then enrolled on Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s MA in dramatic writing. He graduated into the Covid-19 pandemic and embraced digital work, curating four “e-galleries” of interdisciplinary art with the Living Record Festival and producing his own short film, The Zizz. He and his company developed their filmmaking skills, and started supporting their own work by producing performance captures for other companies.
ChewBoy Productions’ second live show Tethered – written by Bailey, directed by Betts and performed by Bailey and Darling – ran at The Lion and Unicorn Theatre last July, and will return there during ChewFest. It’s third, DJ Bazzer’s Year 6 Disco, lost its VAULT Festival run, but turned heads at the National Student Drama Festival and elsewhere earlier this spring. “I want to go on holiday pretty soon,” laughs Bailey. “Things have been pretty intense.”
Right now, though, alongside producing ChewFest, Bailey is busy redrafting the script for the company’s next show, Caligari, which will run at the Edinburgh Fringe as one of three winners of Underbelly, Methuen Drama and the New Diorama Theatre’s prestigious Untapped Award. Written by Bailey and directed by Betts, it will – in-keeping with ChewBoy Productions’ ethos – be composed and performed by five actor-musicians graduating from Rose Bruford College this summer.
“The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is a 1920 German expressionist silent horror film, which is a lot of big words” explains Bailey. “It has one of the earliest twist endings in horror film history, and the visuals of it are incredible and unnerving. We have always thought it had so much theatrical potential, so we just decided to go for it. Edinburgh can be terrifying, but having the support of the Untapped Award makes it a lot less daunting.”
“My writing used to be quite safe and conventional and serious, then I realised I actually enjoyed writing stuff that was a bit batshit and wacky,” Bailey continues. “Now, I am at a point where I just want to engage audiences in conversations. Live audiences are the one thing theatre has above other mediums, so why would you ignore them?”
What do you want to do?
My big, long-term goal is to run a theatre with the same ethos as ChewBoy Productions. Short-term, I just want to go on holiday.
As for the company, we want to keep creating opportunities and experiences for emerging, experimental artists, and eventually do that from some sort of community hub. We want to start making bigger shows, going on bigger tours, and doing co-productions with other organisations. We want to take the next step.
What support do you need to get there?
For me and for the company, the most helpful thing would be advice and mentorship. If someone can share their knowledge on how to run a festival or a venue, or even where to look for training in how to do that, I’d be so grateful.
How can people find out more about you?
Come to the festival. Come to the show in Edinburgh, or at one of our previews in London. Visit our website or our Twitter. Or just email us or DM us. We are always open to conversations.
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Fergus Morgan