Seven stunning photos from the Royal Court's new archive, theatremakers Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse, and three shows to see...
The Sloane Square theatre's Living Archive project is a theatrical goldmine. Plus: the Scottish duo behind new play Same Team at the Traverse Theatre, three shows to see, and more...
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
Below, you’ll find a selection of remarkable production photos from the Royal Court’s new Living Archive project; a chat with Scottish theatremakers Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse, co-founders of company Wonder Fools and the writers behind Same Team: A Street Soccer Story, which is running at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre; and three show recommendations from me.
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Last week, the Royal Court launched Living Archive, a new digital project compiling information, images and memories of the nearly 2000 new plays that have appeared on its stages since the theatre opened in 1956.
The idea is that the archive will grow organically, contributed to by researchers and readers alike, to become a vast database of everything that the Royal Court has done over the last 67 years. Vicky Featherstone, the theatre’s outgoing artistic director, called it “a portal into the words, passions, beliefs and craft of the writers and theatre-makers who have brought their skill, care and curiosity to the Royal Court.”
At present, the archive is still in its infancy. All the productions are there, but most only have the cast and crew listed, alongside dates, details and a brief blurb. Some have been more fleshed out with rehearsal photos and production pictures. I have spent an unhealthy amount of time looking through these photos this week. I find them really compelling for a variety of reasons: some remind me of an incredible show I saw, some show the actual appearance of famous shows I had previously only imagined, and all do something remarkable in preserving an ephemeral moment in exquisite detail. Theatre is, of course, impermanent. These photos are not.
The Royal Court is at an interesting time in its history. Next year, Featherstone will step down as artistic director after over ten years in charge, to be succeeded by David Byrne, who will be moving on from the New Diorama Theatre after spending 13 years in post there. It is, as I have written before, an intriguing appointment. Featherstone is a dynamic director, but one that has by-and-large stuck to the Royal Court’s traditional prioritisation of new work by playwrights. Byrne turned the New Diorama into a mini-but-mighty powerhouse by programming and developing collaborative, company-led work. How the Royal Court will change under his leadership, and how he will change under the flag of Sloane Square, will be fascinating to see.
Anyway, with that imminent crossroads in mind, I thought I would share some of the photos I found on the Royal Court’s new archive this week. Here are seven, taken from different eras in the Royal Court’s history, beginning with the show that started it all.
Glasgow-based theatremakers Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse have spent much of the last eighteen months playing five-a-side football in Dundee with a group of extraordinary women.
Once a week, the two of them would travel to Dundee Change Centre, a facility run by the charity Street Soccer Scotland, which organises football-themed personal development programmes for those experiencing mental health trouble, homelessness, substance addiction, or any other difficult issue. They would play a game of football with a group of women, then run a writing workshop with them.
“Jack’s really good at football, but I’m shite,” says Gordon.
“You’re not shite,” replies Nurse. “He works hard. He’s most improved player.”
The goal of the sessions, led by the women that took part in them, coalesced around building a play from their stories. The result is Same Team: A Street Soccer Story, which premieres at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre next week. It follows a group of five women representing Scotland at the Homeless Women’s World Cup, a real event that visited Glasgow in 2016. “By Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse, story created with the women of Dundee Change Centre,” runs the writing credit.
“The story bubbled up organically from the sessions,” says Nurse. “Quite a few players had participated at tournaments, so very quickly the show became about a five-a-side team playing at a Homeless World Cup. The characters in the play are inspired by their lived experiences, but none of it is directly autobiographical. It is a bit of a mosaic, but they have a real sense of ownership over it.”
“Jack and I basically went away and distilled everything down, then went back and they told us what was good and what was shite, and we went from there,” adds Gordon. “I suppose ultimately we wanted to represent the work that Street Soccer Scotland do. We wanted to represent the transformational impact that both sport and theatre can have on different people’s lives.”
“Our ethos is all about trying to create socially engaged work that has a big, national, or even international appeal…”
The whole project reflects Gordon and Nurse’s shared theatrical ambition. Gordon grew up in Prestonpans, east of Edinburgh. Nurse grew up in Kirkcudbright in Dumfries and Galloway. Both got involved with youth theatres as teenagers, then met while training at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. After graduating, they founded Wonder Fools in 2017, the company through which make a lot of their work – although not Same Team, which is a Traverse Theatre production.
“We very quickly realised we had shared cultural tastes, and a shared experience of growing up in places where there is not a lot going on culturally,” explains Nurse. “We decided to make work together that would appeal to ordinary people, that was about real things that everybody could relate to, but that had an inherent sense of theatricality and entertaining spectacle.”
“Yeah, I think our ethos is all about trying to create socially engaged work that has a big, national, or even international appeal,” adds Gordon. “We like to make work with a community that everyone can latch onto, then take it far and wide. That was our mission when we were sat drinking cheap alcohol at university, and that is still our mission now.”
Through Wonder Fools – the two of them write, Nurse directs, and Gordon often performs – the duo have made seven shows with theatres and communities across Scotland and beyond. Their most significant show to date is 549: Scots Of The Spanish Civil War, a moving, time-hopping show about four Prestonpans men who joined the International Brigade in 1936, which toured in 2019 and 2022. During lockdown, they created youth participatory project Positive Stories For Negative Times, too.
Outside of Wonder Fools, Nurse works as a freelance director – he has just worked with London’s Almeida Theatre on large-scale community production 24 (Day): The Measure Of My Dreams – and Gordon is creative engagement director at the Traverse Theatre. Both are under no illusions that, given the dire state of public arts funding in Scotland, constructing sustainable careers in the theatre industry will be tricky.
“Ideally we’d get some regular funding for Wonder Fools, but even within that model, we won’t make full-time jobs out of it,” says Gordon. “We love working together, though, and we will figure out ways to do it whatever happens.”
“Yeah, we will make it work somehow,” agrees Nurse. “We will work in Scotland. We will work in London. We would go to Timbuktu if there was a social engagement process happening in a theatre there.”
Same Team: A Street Soccer Story is at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh until December 23.
Three shows to see next week
Aganeza Scrooge - Tron Theatre, until January 7
Returning for the first time since its premiere in 2012, Johnny McKnight’s pantomime adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol sees the story relocated to Glasgow and Scrooge recast as a leopard-print-leotarded, loadsamoney businesswoman. Directed by Sally Reid, it works as both social satire and festive fun, and features a riotously entertaining performance from Louise McCarthy. You can read my four-star review for The Stage here, and you can get tickets via the button below.
Glacier - Old Fire Station, Oxford, until December 23
This debut play from Irish comedian Alison Spittle follows the friendship between three women, forged over annual trips to go wild swimming on Christmas Day. Directed by Madeleine Moore and starring Debra Baker, Emma Lau and Fringe favourite Sophie Steer, it is a festive comedy that explores tricky topics with tenderness. It “ducks yawn-inducing clichés and locates humour in the deepest and murkiest of places,” according to critic Holly O’Mahony in The Stage. You can get tickets via the button below.
Dreaming and Drowning - Bush Theatre, until January 5
Written and directed by Kwame Owusu, and produced in association with WoLab, this coming-of-age, magical-realist one-man-play features Tienne Simon as Malachi, a black, queer and bookish student struggling to fit in at university. Dave Fargnoli admired its “appealingly offbeat approach to themes of racism, anxiety and self-discovery” and praised “Simon’s “distinct and amusing” performance. You can read his four-star review in The Stage here, and book tickets via the button below.
One more recommendation
My sister Phoebe - a publishing director with Hodder and a brilliant author, among many other things - has kindly (and, crucially, freely) edited almost every issue of this newsletter since it started back in 2021. She is also a member of The Crouch End Players, a community theatre group based in North London. Next weekend, she will be multi-roling as both Mary and Tiny Tim in the group’s hotly anticipated festive mash-up The 12 Gifts Of Christmas at Holy Innocents Church on Tottenham Lane. There are three performances - one on Friday evening, and two on Saturday - and I heartily recommend buying a ticket to one - or all three! - 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/X, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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See you next Friday for what will be the last issue of 2023.
Fergus