Grace Gallagher - actor, artistic director, clown
The co-founder of Ugly Bucket Theatre has learned to embrace her inner idiot.
Hello…
..and welcome to The Crush Bar, my fortnightly newsletter about theatre and the people that make it, arriving in your inbox every other Friday with the regularity of a David Hare play in the Lyttleton. You’ll find the first issue - an interview with the awesome Grace Gallagher, followed by a few bits and bobs - below. If you haven’t subscribed already, then please…
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Interview: Grace Gallagher
Grace Gallagher is serious about being silly. Her company, Liverpool-based Ugly Bucket Theatre, takes difficult subjects and turns them into weird and wacky shows, stuffed full of slapstick and silliness, grimacing and gurning, pranks and pratfalls. She is a contemporary clown: she mucks around to make you think.
“If you can make people laugh, you can make them listen,” Gallagher says. “And that’s what we want to do. We want to shed light on topics that people don’t talk about, and we want to make it mad and crazy and hilarious at the same time.”
No-one is making work quite like Gallagher. Ugly Bucket shows are exhilarating, intense experiences. At their core are verbatim recordings of interviews conducted by the company – interviews with people who have first-hand experience of the show’s serious subject – around which a lurid, lip-synced cocktail of techno-music and tomfoolery is painstakingly put together. They are kind-of comparable to LUNG Theatre’s documentary productions, only 1000 times sillier.
“If you can make people laugh, you can make them listen…”
“I guess it is like journalism on stage, in a way,” says Gallagher. “We never change what someone has said. We never twist it or mould it. We just enhance it. We find the funny and the feeling in it. And because the topics are quite taboo, people have so much to spill if you just ask them the right questions. I love people. I love talking to them. It’s almost like we’re Louis Theroux.”
Ugly Bucket has made two full-length fringe shows so far. Bost-Uni Plues, which tackled the underexposed issue of post-graduate depression with the help of an inflatable mallet, and 2 Clowns 1 Cup, which explored everything that is unsexy about sex using custard pies and jaffa cakes. A third, Good Grief, is in development, its premiere put on hold by the pandemic.
“Each show is a rollercoaster,” Gallagher explains. “There are really funny bits, and really heartbreaking bits, and we are able to tread that line so thinly that the audience doesn’t know whether they should be laughing or crying sometimes. We have to be really careful, of course, because we are using real people’s stories and words. But sometimes you do have to take risks with them, and as long as you are honest, the humour tends to work itself out.”
Gallagher is almost an accidental clown. Born in 1995, she grew up determined to become a musical theatre star but struggled to gain a place at drama school. She spent two years trying, ended up doing a foundation course in her hometown of Nottingham, and eventually got onto a course at Liverpool John Moores University. Even then, though, it took a long time for her to learn to lean into what came naturally to her.
“At uni, I was always marked down for my acting because I was too clowny,” she remembers. “I’ve got quite an expressive face, and people always told me that I was doing too much, that I needed to do less on stage. But then in my third year, the final show I did was a really big, outrageous physical comedy. It was all about more, more, more.”
“It was like I’d finally figured out what I was good at,” she adds. “I don’t know why I spent so long trying to fit other people’s briefs. You’ve got to do what you are good at. I think that is such an important thing to learn.”
Gallagher formed Ugly Bucket after graduating, using her own experiences of post-graduate depression, and those of her friends, to build the company’s first show Bost-Uni Plues. At the time, she didn’t even know that she was becoming a clown. She just wanted to do something – anything – creative.
“I don’t know why I spent so long trying to fit other people’s briefs…”
“Graduating was like having the rug pulled out from under our feet,” she says. “None of us could understand why we weren’t getting any auditions and were back doing the waitressing jobs we’d done throughout uni. So we just decided to do our own thing. We remembered the key code for the uni drama studio, and we would sneak in at night and rehearse. I used my guitar case to carry all the props around.”
Ugly Bucket took Bost-Uni Plues to the National Student Drama Festival in 2019, where Gallagher won the Spotlight Award for Most Promising Actor and the show won Slung Low’s Holbeck Cup. A crowdfunding campaign helped take both Bost-Uni Plues and their second show, 2 Clowns 1 Cup, to Edinburgh for a sold-out two-week run.
“I had worked the fringe for seven years as staff, so I thought I’d be ready, but I was so thrown by how different the experience was,” Gallagher remembers. “We were in a tiny flat, sharing a bed and a sofa-bed between four, next to a washing machine that was broken and banged against our feet all night. We couldn’t even afford to stay the night we finished the run.”
“I don’t think we got as much out of it as we thought we would,” she continues. “It was so hard to get programmers to come see us, and getting reviewers in was even harder. But we sold out every day, the audiences loved it and we very nearly broke even.”
Ugly Bucket’s third show – Good Grief, about bereavement – was originally meant to make a splash at 2020’s cancelled Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in the middle of a national tour that ran until December. Fingers crossed, says Gallagher, that it will be able to do all that in 2021 instead.
“A good friend of ours, Tim Miles, was dying of cancer, and he asked us if we would make a ten-minute comedy piece to be performed at his memorial service,” Gallagher says of the show’s inception. “So we did. When you take on a topic like that, though, it just snowballs. We realised we had a lot more to say, so we decided to turn it into a whole show.”
Gallagher hasn’t been idle while she waits for Good Grief to get the audience it deserves, though. Ugly Bucket continued making work throughout 2020 – a short, still-available film called ABC (Anything But Covid) for HOME about the psychological impact of lockdown, and a roving improv street-show called The Holiblobs, which she plans to bring back for festivals and fun-days in the future.
“Being scared of clowns doesn’t make you an interesting person…”
“I also did an online course in the history of clowning this year,” says Gallagher. “We never really had a rulebook of what clowning was when we started making work. We didn’t go to Gaullier or Lecoq. We just did our own thing. But now, I’ve learned so much about the different types of clowning, and I’ve been thinking a lot about where we fit in clown-world.”
“I used to be really self-conscious about calling what we do clowning, because clown-world can be quite intimidating – the funniest thing about clowning is how seriously people take it,” she adds. “And then there are people that say they are scared of clowns. I’m so bored of that. I want to tell them that being scared of clowns doesn’t make you an interesting person.”
“Lots of people don’t know what clowning really is, and while it can get really complicated and academic when you get into it, I think it is fundamentally really simple,” she concludes. “I’ve decided that anything that challenges me and makes me laugh at the same time, I can call clowning.”
“The most helpful thing someone could do for me is…”
Book one of our shows! Just book us. It would be so great.
Meet us for a chat and a coffee. That sort of thing is invaluable and it doesn’t happen often enough.
I would bite someone’s hand off to make an Ugly Bucket Christmas show!
“If you want to get an idea of what I do…”
Watch the YouTube series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared. Bright colours, music, puppets, and horrifying twists - it was a huge inspiration behind ABC, our about staying productive in Lockdown.
Watch The Mighty Boosh. It is absurdity at its finest and has no doubt shaped my sense of humour.
Listen to our warm-up playlist. We use it to build up a high, electric energy that we can unleash into an audience. It is also good for parties.
Bits and bobs, shouts and murmurs…
WhatsOnStage’s Theatre Faces To Look Out For In 2021 - written by my pal Alex Wood - is a lovely reminder that everyone in the theatre industry needs to look out for each other. Because, let’s face it, nobody else is going to…
Ian Rickson’s filmed version of Uncle Vanya is on iPlayer, and it is brilliant. And you can read this Big Interview I did with him earlier this year to find out what a charming chap he is.
Alan Lane and Slung Low have done extraordinary things for their community this year. This blog post about his grandfather, his son, and his belief in service is super.
This Guardian piece about utopias, and why so few plays depict them is another example of Natasha Tripney being brilliant. I particularly like Vinay Patel’s idea that if hell is other people, then heaven is too.
This New York Times long-read by Jennifer Schuessler about the ill-fated production of Frankenstein is just great. Who doesn’t love to read about massive Broadway flops? I love that whole thing about the NYT review of something making or breaking a show only hours after opening night.
This petition asking the government to sort out some sort of visa-free work permit for artists visiting Europe has got over 200,000 signatures. Please add yours.
Ciao for now…
And that’s it for the first issue. Thanks for reading. Thanks for subscribing. Thanks for everything. Another issue will drop into your inbox in a fortnight’s time.
In the meantime, feel free to get in touch (you can just reply to this email, or I’m @FergusMorgan in most places) if you found something interesting, or have an idea for a future interviewee, or just want to say hello.
I’ll leave you with another plea to spread the word as far and as wide as possible. I’m off to take the dog for a New Year’s Day walk.
Fergus x