Pleasance Futures: After the first 30 years

Last year was the Pleasance’s 30th birthday, and instead of having a crisis about what to do with the rest of their lives, they decided to throw a huge celebration. Now they’re looking forward, and with a new structure in place to support burgeoning theatrical talent called Pleasance Futures, it’s young people and young companies that are at this theatre's heart.

Tim Norton, who has worked with Young Pleasance for the last 20 years, describes Pleasance Futures as “a way of trying to bring together the various different strands that the venue has. It’s always had a policy of encouraging young performers, both comedians and technicians, as well as writers, directors and actors.”

That's evidenced in the Young Pleasance company's annual production and the Charlie Hartill Fund, used to bring a young company up to Edinburgh for the duration, in addition to the Comedy Reserve which does likewise for young comics. Furthermore, because the company takes on so many newcomers to the industry as technicians and venue managers, it has also become an important laboratory for young people wanting experience on the technical side. Pleasance Futures is then able to provide a way of support to people that actually want to set up their own theatre companies, either financially or through mentoring and advice.

Iin this year’s programme, Pleasance provide a great example of just how they help young companies to move forward with their careers. “We have the Incognito theatre company,” Norton says, “that came directly out of students from Young Pleasance being supported this year with a venue in Edinburgh. And there are numerous ways in which funding or advice or support is being given to new groups wanting to come up, or maybe former students who just need that extra support trying to set up in as professional a way as possible.” This description extends as well to Squint Theatre, the winners of this year’s Charlie Hartill fund.

“Last year, a show we really wanted to support was just too big to take to Edinburgh. They had about 15 people in the company, and so over the next 18 months Pleasance supported that company to do their first run of performances in London as opposed to going to Edinburgh.” This year, Squint Theatre secured the award with a new piece and so the Pleasance continues to support their endeavours with a venue slot in Edinburgh and £7,400 worth of support. 

“It’s a very exciting time for the Pleasance, and for Pleasance Futures in particular, because at last there is a much more formal structure, so it’s going to be easier when people come with projects and we can say, 'Actually this is the route that we can support you through.' It’s something that we’re very keen to develop.” Norton tells us it has always been their philosophy to nurture and work with young talent, “but now there actually is that space and that structure, and that formal way of bringing that philosophy in through comedy and through technical theatre; directing, writing and acting. Pleasance is such a good name to have behind you and the Pleasance is very good at providing a lot of support for people.” 

Speaking of the Young Pleasance in particular, who will this year be bringing The Hampstead Murder Mystery! to the Fringe, Norton first tried to begin the endeavour in 1994, looking for a venue for a new play he was bringing to the festival. "I originally took it to Christopher Richardson and he said, 'No to a venue, but I’ll design the play for you.’ We actually won the Fringe First for that play, so the following year Christopher said, 'You must bring your next production to Pleasance One,' which was a big musical called Bus. Two years later that youth theatre became the Young Pleasance and since then we’ve done one, sometimes two productions every year either in Edinburgh or in London.” 

It’s an incredibly long history of success for Norton, who says that one of the best things to come out of his longevity is seeing where the students move on to. “What’s great now is when you go up to Edinburgh, so many former YP students are either performing their own work or working in different venues. That’s a legacy that is very, very important to us.” This legacy begins within the Young Pleasance company itself, as some students return for one or two years, passing on their experience to the newbies as well as gaining upon their own experience. “It’s a big step up for young people who might be very good, might be very gifted, might have quite a lot of opportunity in their schools or youth groups,” he continues. As well as learning from each other, the students learn from exposure: “What tends to happen is that the maximum number of performances that you’ll ever get in a school year is about four, and the difference suddenly of doing 16 performances over two and a half weeks... You can really see the difference, how they develop as a result of having that experience and actually learning and understanding what they’re doing because of that process of repeated performance.” It’s a little like immersion therapy, with a rehearsal period of only nine or ten days. “They don’t have time to be distracted by their mobile phones or wanting to go off on holiday with their friends. Most people would think that’s insane, to start from scratch, but it does mean that you work at immense speed with that adrenaline that keeps everyone going.” 

The Hampstead Murder Mystery! itself is an adaptation of a 1915 detective novel dramatised by Norton and co-director Jo Billington. “We want to make it quite a physical piece. It has 180 characters; we have about seven or eight of the cast that are just performing seven roles, but most of the rest of the cast are playing up to about 12 or 13 different roles.” In relation to the story, the cast of 26 seems small, but in relation to the much of the Fringe it is a sizeable group. “We’re not really that interested in working with small groups for the simple reason that we’re trying to involve as many people as possible. Young Pleasance is very much about the ensemble and making everybody feel that they have a hugely important role in the whole piece – and get an awful lot of exposure on the stage,” says Norton, recalling the aforementioned legacy. “I think there’s 39 scenes so it’s going to be very fast and a little bit tongue-in-cheek. Essentially you've got a body in the library right at the start of the play, and practically all the other characters are suspects so the whole piece keeps twisting and turning, hopefully in a very interesting way.” The murder will be solved at Pleasance this August, so make sure to get along to find out just which promising young actor was the perpetrator all along. 

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Following their debut at last year’s Fringe with Government Inspector, emerging young company Incognito Theatre are back at the Pleasance with their version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Director Anna Simpson took some time out of her busy show to discuss the highlights of their forthcoming Fringe programme. 

Incognito's relationship (“as friends as well as actors," she explains) began at Young Pleasance. "Working together for five years in demanding ensemble shows meant when we struck out on our own we already had a trust, a shared humour, and a collective instinct for working together, which is at the heart of the work we create.” Simpson talks about the “rigorous workshop, callback and audition” process young performers go through to enter Young Pleasance, and how “once you are in the company you are treated as a young artist in your own right. Members of the Young Pleasance are lucky enough to work with amazing professionals – great writers, directors and so on, and consequently are given a strong grounding in physical and ensemble styles of performance, but you are also encouraged from day one to bring your own ideas to the rehearsal room.” It was this platform upon which Incognito found their own voice as a company, already “using our initiative and imagination to create and tell stories.”

The company are ‘Powered by Pleasance’, so it’s clear to see how the support that Young Pleasance gave to these artists is carrying through as they move into their own endeavours. “As well as all the valuable practical help, both financial and administrative (two major barriers to emerging theatre companies learning how to manage the business side of things, especially when heading to the biggest arts festival in the world) the Pleasance have given us something invaluable – their trust,” says Simpson. “Last year they took a chance on us as a company, trusting our raw talent, artistic vision and enthusiasm. It paid off and we proved ourselves worthy of that trust: our debut Government Inspector garnered four and five-star reviews across the board and sold out nearly every day – an incredible achievement for a young unknown company at the Edinburgh Fringe, and a feat that would have been nearly impossible without the Pleasance's help.”

"Once you are in the company you are treated as a young artist in your own right" - Anna Simpson on Young Pleasance

And this success is a benefit to both Incognito and the Pleasance, who transferred the show for a short Christmas run in December 2014 at the Pleasance Islington, and have continued to support it at other arts festivals. This year Dorian Gray will be performed in the 10 Dome – a bigger venue than last year, expanding upon the support and the success shared by the company and venue. 

Speaking of Government Inspector, Simpson explains that “the satire of the piece [allowed] us to use our highly stylised physical techniques to comedic effect. We were able to embrace the silly and ridiculous in the story, bring our humour to the fore and revel in play and sheer fun.” With Dorian Gray the company will “flex our dramatic acting muscles alongside our comedy ones – we can't fall back on slapstick to get an audience reaction this time!” The lack of slapstick moments in Wilde’s novel does not, however, remove the physical element from their performance. “We use no set or props but use the ensemble to create everything – characters, physical environments and atmospheres – working as a chorus to tell the story expressionistically rather than realistically. We take an idea and try to find the best and most interesting visual conduit for it, and Dorian Gray is full of interesting ideas and inspiring aesthetics.” 

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The Charlie Hartill Special Reserve Fund recipients are similarly ensemble driven. Artistic director Andrew Whyment began Squint Theatre in 2009, initially exploring contemporary playwrights: “We shifted our focus and decided that we’d try and make our first piece of original work," he explains. As well as prioritising the ensemble, Whyment wanted the company to stay topical: “We aim to be as provocative as we can with stories that are as current as possible.”

However, moving out of the student sphere hasn’t been easy financially: “For about three years we’ve had the ambition to be up there with one of our new plays and haven’t been able to raise the cash for it.” This is where the Charlie Hartill Fund comes in: Squint applied for the fund last year and were shortlisted. “We didn’t win on that occasion but we still brought our show to Pleasance in London to sort of build a relationship, and then on our return to entering the prize we were again shortlisted. So we shared our new piece and we won the prize. It really was about us building a relationship with Pleasance over the past year or so. They saw our previous show and then liked the idea for what we were going to do next.” 

It’s not just the invaluable financial support the Pleasance gives, but space. “We work at scale. Our work is quite technical – there’s always a multimedia element with sound design and video being a big part of it – and very ensemble-driven with lots of movement,” says Whyment. “There aren’t many spaces in London that really offer an emerging company the opportunity to work in a large space. The Pleasance main space here in London is perfect in terms of being able to fulfil the ambition of our work.”

Although Fringe venues are famously small, Pleasance have supported the scope of their work. “We made it clear that we’d really like to be able to work at scale in Edinburgh and so they’ve given us a midsize venue, which is brilliant because it means we can really allow our design elements and movement elements to be present in the show.”

The show itself is written by Whyment along with Lee Anderson and Adam Foster, and explores sociopathy. “There’s always that desperation, from the media and the audience, to dig for what makes that person who they are and to try and identify that moment in their childhood where they turned or whatever it might be. I suppose we were interested in trying to create a character who we were studying under that lens of ‘is it nature or is it nurture that causes them to be sociopathic?'” 

The resulting production Molly is indebted to Confessions of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas. “In this book this woman knows that she is by diagnosis a sociopath. She herself is trying to trace what has made her that way, and to articulate how she has to live in the everyday world where her behaviour is unacceptable, and how it is that she quells those urges to do atrocious things at times. And so our character really stems from M.E. Thomas and the character of herself that she portrays in her book. It's become a play which is really about empathising or attempting to empathise with an individual who cannot empathise, and trying to look at what makes her the way she is and look at the way in which society might create a narrative for that person which isn’t entirely true.”

Three very different plays created by emerging artists await at Pleasance this August, but one thing that is certain is that young people are at the heart of something exciting.