Paul Smith - artistic director, Middle Child Theatre
The gig-theatre pioneer on his company's journey so far.
Afternoon…
Hope you’ve had a good week. I have been watching a lot of football and a lot of tennis. I once interviewed Simon Stephens, and he said he thought you could learn a lot about writing plays from watching the 2008 Wimbledon final between Nadal and Federer, so any budding playwrights reading this, get a big bowl of strawberries and cream, put the BBC coverage on and do some “research”…
Anyway, welcome to the thirteenth issue of The Crush Bar, my fortnightly newsletter about theatre and the people that make it. If you haven’t subscribed yet, then please…
Below, you’ll find an interview with Paul Smith, the artistic director of Middle Child Theatre, whose work I have loved ever since I first saw it in a tent at Latitude in 2017. We chatted on the phone earlier this week, ahead of an exciting few weeks for Middle Child, as you will soon find out.
Before that, though, if you could smash the share button below, that’d be much appreciated.
Okay. Here’s the interview. See you at the bottom for bits and bobs…
Interview: Paul Smith
Here is a slightly embarrassing confession: I have a Middle Child Theatre t-shirt. Wait! Before my reputation as an incorruptible critic is tarnished forever, I want to explain that it was a present. Someone bought it for me as a joke during the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe, when I would not shut up about the Hull-based company and their brilliant new show, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything.
Written by Luke Barnes, the show was a time-hopping epic about disillusioned millennials and impending asteroids, on at 8.45pm in the Paines Plough Roundabout, and it was unlike anything I had seen before – an anarchic hour-and-a-bit of songs and storytelling, as unapologetically raucous as it was infectiously euphoric. There was, I learned, a name for shows like this: gig-theatre.
“I think someone else came up with that name,” says Paul Smith, the company’s artistic director. “Early on, we used ‘event theatre’ and ‘theatre with a reason to come early and stay late’. We first heard ‘gig-theatre’ somewhere after that and started using it as we realised it would communicate something to our target audiences, particularly in Hull.”
“It’s not just about the form of the piece. It is about how it is made, how it is marketed, and how it is talked about…”
What exactly is gig-theatre? Well, explains Smith, it is not just about the live collision of music and words on stage, although that is obviously a huge part of it. It is also about how that collision is staged, where it is staged, what audience it is staged for, and how that audience is encouraged to behave.
“There are obviously a lot of shows with live music out there, but a lot of it is basically traditional theatre with a band in it,” Smith says. “We try to think about the pairing of gig and theatre in a more holistic way. It is not just about the form of the piece. It is also about how it is made, how it is marketed, and how it is talked about.”
That, he continues, means telling stories that genuinely reflect real people’s lived experiences. It means telling them in a way those people can relate to, and collaborating with other artists and musicians to do so. It means telling those stories in places those people feel comfortable – clubs, pubs, bars and festivals – and not telling them to sit down and shut up while they watch.
Smith was born in 1986 in Harlow, Essex, a town he describes as having “lots going for it, but a lot of problems as well”. He only discovered a passion for drama because it was the one lesson he got praised for mucking around in at school.
His mum took him to theatre classes at Harlow Playhouse, where he was taught by “some really skilled people still early in their careers”, including the directors Michael Fentiman and Phil Dale. Even though he was increasingly serious about a career in the performing arts, though, Smith was shy about saying so to his friends.
“Theatre was this weird little secret I didn’t want to talk about,” he says. “I had these two identities as this football-supporting lad who would go to the pub and drink pints and cheer on Man United, and this kid who would act in pantomimes and dance and stuff, and those two worlds never crossed. Even my closest friends wouldn’t come see me in shows. Looking back now, it seems obvious that that experience is why I do what I do now, and why I make the theatre I make.”
“Theatre was this weird little secret I didn’t want to talk about…”
Smith did a BTEC at Harlow College, then went on to study at the University of Hull. He already knew he was “a terrible actor”, so he turned to directing and “went a bit crazy”, directing thirty plays in his three years as a student. He followed that with a directing course at LAMDA, but found himself uninspired by the traditional professional path for early-career directors.
“Then Mike Bradwell, who founded the original Hull Truck in the 1970s, came in and spoke to us,” Smith says. “He told us it was time to squat a building and steal a van and make some art. I went straight to the pub and wrote this 12-page manifesto for a new company in Hull. I sent that to 25 people, saying: ‘Look, I’m going to do this. Do you want to join me?’ Nine of them wrote back and said: ‘Yep, we’re in.’ And we were the founding members of Middle Child.”
That was 2011. The company made their first shows in 2012, but it took time for Smith and his fellow members to find the formula that has defined their work. That eventual discovery, says Smith, was driven by a desire to reach a new audience, one did not feel comfortable coming to traditional forms of theatre.
“I remember looking out into the crowd at one show and realising we had kind of become exactly what we didn’t want to be – a company that makes work to impress the theatre industry in London and Edinburgh, rather than to connect with audiences,” Smith says. “So we went through this process of looking at where the audience we wanted to connect with actually was, and we realised they were at festivals and music gigs. There’s a huge live music scene in Hull, but none of those people were coming to the theatre.”
Well, thought Middle Child, if our audience is not coming to the theatre, let’s take theatre to our audience. In 2013, the company made their first gig-theatre show – an adaptation of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, staged in a warehouse the company converted into a 1950s dancehall. In 2014, they produced Luke Barnes’ Weekend Rockstars, a Sheffield story set to music inspired by The Streets, which subsequently toured to Edinburgh, Battersea Arts Centre, and beyond. That, says Smith, was when people started to take notice of what they were doing.
“We try to marry the best bits of gigs and festivals with the best bits of theatre. And people seem to like it…”
The major milestone for Middle Child came in 2017, though, the year they made All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, the year they were made one of the Arts Council’s National Portfolio Organisations (somewhat surprisingly, as they were a relatively small, relatively young company at the time), and the year Hull was UK City Of Culture.
“2017 was transformative for us in a lot of ways,” says Smith. “We wanted to do something really special for the City Of Culture celebrations. We wanted to tell the ultimate story of being a millennial, of being let down over all the things we were promised. That was All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and it was a big experiment, really. We staged the first version of it in a nightclub called Welly in Hull. We divided it into three acts, and programmed local bands to play in between. The nightclub opened when the show stopped.”
Subsequent shows have tackled different subjects and different styles of music – 2018’s One Life Stand was an electronica-influenced elegy about digital dissociation; 2019’s The Canary And The Crow was a grime-filled saga about the interplay of education and ethnicity; the same year’s Us Against Whatever was a bilingual cabaret about both sides of Brexit, with karaoke in the interval – but they have followed a similar format, and embraced a similar energy. Even Middle Child’s annual pantomimes are twice as loud and twice as messy as most Christmas shows.
“We try to marry the best bits of gigs and festivals with the best bits of theatre,” says Smith. “And people seem to like it.”
Becoming an NPO in 2017 was huge for Middle Child, too. At the time, when most of the company’s members “lived in horrible conditions and didn’t like each other very much”, it was a question of securing funding or shutting down, says Smith. NPO status guaranteed Middle Child £150,000 of subsidy a year, and it allowed them to expand, both creatively, structurally (the company now has a board, a range of associate artists, and four full-time members of staff), and in the community.
“We wanted to make sure, once we had all that money, that we wouldn’t gobble up all the resources ourselves,” says Smith. “We wanted to make sure we brought other people in Hull along with us, too. We had always wanted to do that, ever since we started, but it is hard to change the world on a few grand. We always wanted to be more than a theatre company.”
To that end, Middle Child has introduced several new initiatives in recent years, all with the aim of developing viable career pathways in the performing arts in Hull and the surrounding area. It has run a programme coaching young reviewers to foster a local culture of criticism. It has instituted an annual writing group with the playwright Tom Wells. It has even opened a library of playtexts. And all the opportunities the company runs are paid or free; no-one ever has to dip into their own pocket to take part.
Has it had an effect? “Definitely,” says Smith. “When I first moved here, people didn’t really understand why. I have noticed that people are now a lot less surprised that artists want to live and work in Hull than they used to be. It’s such a great city. You can make exciting work here, you can be part of an artistic community here, and you can have a positive impact here, too.”
“We always wanted to be more than a theatre company…”
The overarching challenge facing Middle Child now, he continues, is continuing to grow over the next five years without losing sight of the values that have brought the company to where it is today. It is a challenge that Middle Child is already rising to, with a new artist development programme, a new building, and a new show.
The artist development programme – a paid opportunity for 12 Hull-based artists to collaborate under the title Recover, Restart, Reimagine – is already underway. The new building – “It’s got some offices, a rehearsal room, a library, and a lot of potential”, says Smith – will open in a few weeks. And the show, an outdoor cabaret called We Used To Be Closer Than This, will be performed at Hull’s Queen’s Gardens on the 16th, 17th, and 18th of July, and will feature work made with a range of artists, including Angelo Irving, Tabby Lamb, and RashDash.
“We wanted to tell as many different versions of what we have all been through over the last year as possible,” Smith explains. “We wanted to reject the idea that we have all had the same experience of the pandemic, because that is just not true. So we decided to bring together a really diverse group of writers from a load of different backgrounds and stage a cabaret outdoors in the sunshine that tackles the question of how we can reconnect with each other.”
“We did dabble in digital stuff during lockdown, but it just doesn’t suit us,” he continues. “We’ve spent years and years honing how to make better live experiences, and we can’t wait to get back to that.”
“The most helpful thing someone could do for me is…”
We regularly get asked how work set in Hull will resonate with audiences outside of the city, in a way we probably wouldn’t if the show was set on the moon! Let’s remember that work is often more universal because of how local and specific it is rather than in spite of it.
Involve freelancers in decision making at every level of the organisation. It’s something we’re doing more and more of and it has, without fail, improved our perspective and lead to more well-rounded choices being made. (Oh and pay them to do so!)
Accept that new work, new voices and new companies will always be a ‘risk’ until we consistently invest in them, programme them and trust them.
“If you want to get an idea of what I do…”
Read John McGrath’s A Good Night Out. Despite being published in 1981 it remains the best articulation I’ve found of many of the ways in which theatre can exclude certain types of audiences.
Listen to A Grand Don’t Come For Free by The Streets. A piece of art telling a story which my ‘non-theatre mates’ loved but which they’d never have gone to see in a theatre building.
Listen to the soundtrack of Us Against Whatever – a bilingual cabaret show we made about Brexit in a city which voted Leave. The show aimed to talk about a (controversial) big idea in a fun and accessible way which included rather than excluded. (The show prompted this article from Lyn Gardner. The show was never picked up.)
Bits and bobs, shouts and murmurs…
…is a bit different this week. Instead of sharing some of the best bits of theatre writing from the last fortnight, I thought I’d have a scan through the Edinburgh Fringe shows announced yesterday - a manageable task, seeing as there are so few compared to most years - and pick out some I am excited about.
Afloat by Eva O’Connor. She’s the Irish playwright and performer who did Mustard (also coming back this year) and Maz and Bricks, both of which were hilarious and hard-hitting. This new piece is set in post-apocalyptic Dublin and sounds great. It’ll be available online on demand.
Knot. It’s the new trilogy of immersive audio plays from Darkfield - the people who put shows in shipping containers outside Summerhall. I listened to it last week, and it is overwhelmingly good. You’ll be able to listen online, too.
My Car Plays Tapes. Poet John Osborne’s shows are lovely - gentle stories about nice people told by a charming teddy-bear of a man. This one is going to be live at Summerhall!
The Great Gatsby. The Wardrobe Ensemble are Edinburgh Fringe mainstays, and they will be there again this year, albeit virtually, with this critically-acclaimed two-woman adaptation.
Kill Me Now. Dirty Protest Theatre is the brilliant Welsh company behind Alan Harris’ Sugar Baby, and Sian Owen’s How To Be Brave. This is a new dark comedy from Rhiannon Boyle, available online.
We Are Each Other. A new participatory thing from Trevor Lock, live at Summerhall. No further details required.
Enjoy your weekend…
That’s your lot. Hope you enjoyed. I’ll leave you with another request to share this newsletter, if you fancy…
If you want to get in touch for any reason, you can just reply to this email, or contact me on Twitter - I’m @FergusMorgan. Right. That’s that. See you in a fortnight.
Fergus x