Worn Out, a bold retelling of the story of The 12 Dancing Princesses, runs at the Salford venue for four performances from 1 – 3 August. We spoke to the show’s director, Francesca Goodridge about staging the production:

What excited you most about working on this project with BYMT?

Francesca: “I really loved the story of empowerment that this specific project is based on – it’s about rebellion and standing up for what you believe in so I think it’s a great project for young people to contribute to.

“I was also really drawn to the ethos of BYMT and what they stand for. I think that they do a brilliant job of putting teams together, finding really wonderful creative and professional people who are also lovely to work with. Working with kind people on an important story is the dream”.

What can audiences expect from this production?

Francesca: “It’s punchy and it’s got a lot of heart. The music really sticks and stays with you. I think it will be really physical as Paul Smethurst, the choreographer who I’ve worked with before, is brilliant and really smart with how he puts movement into a piece”.

How have young people influenced or inspired the development of this show?

Francesca: “Meg McGrady and Zoe Morris, the writers of Worn Out, have done a lot of work with young people throughout the development of this show including workshopping the material at a BYMT Summer Camp in 2024. They’ve explored ideas including revolution, protest and democracy and what it means to write a musical about princesses today, which has all fed into the show as it stands right now.”

What makes this production particularly relevant for 2025 audiences?

Francesca: “The show is about a group of people that see injustice in their home and they want to make things right in their community, which I think is an important message at any time. For young people especially, I think it will get them thinking about where they’re from and the community that they’re involved in, and recognising that they do have weight, influence and skills to bring good to their community”.

Can you describe a moment in the show that you’re especially proud of or excited for audiences to see?

Francesca: “I’m really excited about the staging of the rebellion, which involves the whole company and is a powerful moment where the characters take a stand for their beliefs. It’s especially meaningful to explore this with a room full of young performers, as we get to discover what standing up for something looks like through their eyes. We’re having important conversations about protest, what it means to them and how they want to express that on stage. A lot of the work is devised by the cast, so it feels deeply personal and authentic, and something audiences will really connect with”.

What does it mean to you to direct a story that empowers young women, especially while working with a majority female cast?

Francesca: “I love working with women and a lot of work I do is usually lead by female stories. I think I’ve come up in my career in a very privileged way and I’ve been mentored by lots of amazing female leaders. I didn’t study directing so I’ve learned through assisting directors, a lot of whom were female artistic directors. I’m just really interested in women in leadership roles and it’s really important to me that the work I make reflects female perspectives, women’s stories and non-binary stories. Working with predominantly female and non-binary performers is ideal for me as I’ve tried to forge a career which focuses on empowering women”.

You’ve recently taken on the role of Artistic Director at Sherman Theatre – how do you feel your role in leadership will affect your approach to this story about power and change?

Francesca: “That’s a great question – and massive. Stepping into a leadership role with a theatre context makes me reflect not only on the themes of power and change within the story, but also on how those ideas are mirrored in the process of making theatre itself. I’m particularly aware of the responsibility to listen to the needs of the young people in the cast, especially those who aspire to work in the performing arts. It’s clear that many of them are on a trajectory towards drama school and it’s important to me to understand what they need from the industry to feel supported and encouraged. Not everyone will have access to formal training, so building real connections and creating space for all kinds of young talent feels essential to help shape a sector that’s open and responsive to the next generation of performers”.

BYMT’s Worn Out runs at Lowry on 1 Aug at 7.30pm, 2 Aug at 2.30pm + 7.30pm, 3 Aug at 2.30pm. Tickets: £22.50 from www.thelowry.com
Suitable for ages (6+)

The post Director Francesca Goodridge talks about new musical Worn Out appeared first on Quays Life.

Now the company has worked with Herzberg to adapt the film for the stage, which arrives at Lowry, Salford on 10 April as part of a 25 venue tour. Quays Life talks to Elysium Artistic Director, Jake Murray to find out more.

Tell us about the COVID 19 Monologues project. How did it come about and did its success surprise you?

Jake: “When Covid hit, Elysium, like every other theatre company in the country, was shut down. We had to cancel a tour of ‘Look Back In Anger’ and had no idea what our future was going to be. We knew we wanted to stay creative and wanted to do something to inspire people as they struggled through the pandemic, but didn’t know how.

“Then I saw a friend of mine, Anand Vyas (sadly no longer with us), an Indian-American, live streaming himself playing the Sitar to give people support. I was then asked to create an online piece of theatre by the Gala and Assembly Rooms Theatres here in Durham, and became excited by the possibilities of monologues that could be rehearsed and filmed over Zoom under lockdown conditions. I came up with the idea of five such monologues. When they did so well, we commissioned five more and then five more.

“We had no idea they would be successful. They won several awards, including an Olwen Wymark Award from the Writers Guild of Great Britain. ‘The Moth’ was seen all over the world and is still racking up views. All 15 are still available online on our website and YouTube channel, so the work is still out there for all to see”.

Is ‘The Moth’ the third of these short films you’ve brought to the stage? How has the process been of adapting these films for the stage?

Jake: “Actually it’s the second. The first was ‘Reiver – Tales From The Borders’ which Steve Byron adapted from his original work ‘Blackmail’. That was an enormous success two years running touring the North East.

“It was Paul’s idea to turn it into a stage play. The first draft was gripping, but Paul went on to keep working on it right up to the rehearsals. I think the first draft was delivered in 2021, so that’s four years of work he’s put into it. The style and format were entirely his creation, as were the characters and themes. All I did was help him refine his vision. It’s been a long process but hugely rewarding. He has done a magnificent job and has always trusted me, even when we disagreed. He’s a fantastic writer”.

The original version was a 10 minute short film (performed by Victor Power). The version you’re touring is a 90-minute, two act, two-hander (featuring Faz Singhateh and Micky Cochrane). How did closely did you and writer Paul Herzberg liaise on that?

Jake: “The main thing is that Paul has taken the short monologue and realised a whole universe with it. The original monologue just focused on the central anecdote that Marius delivers to John on the train. We know very little of who John is or what he does and there is no interaction between the two men beyond that. In the stage play Paul extends the story over three decades with three crucial meetings between the two men in each. The drama alternates between the actors dramatising these scenes together and direct address to the audience.

“All the new detail and the style the play would take were entirely Paul’s creation. It was his decision to make John a TV host and celebrity writer of political journalism and use the idea of a hard-hitting TV show as the format. It was his decision to flesh out the back story of both characters and trace their interaction from 1997 to the present day. All I did was help him refine his already extraordinarily detailed vision”.

How did Bridgerton star, Adjoa Andoh, come to be involved?

Jake: “We needed an actress to provide the voiceover for John’s mother. It so happened that Paul new Adjoa from when she played a character in a radio version of one of his earlier plays, ‘The Dead Wait’, from back in the 90s and worked with her again in an episode of ‘Bridgerton’. Our consultant producer, Andy Jordan, also knew her, so we dropped her a line and to our surprise and delight she said she was happy to do it. It was a great act of generosity. She did it brilliantly, without any direction. It comes in a key moment in the play and is the only time we hear a female voice in what is a very masculine drama. Her performance is perfect”.

What would you like audiences to take away from the encounter between a black British activist and a former member of apartheid South Africa’s armed forces, as presented in the play?

Jake: “I think there are two primary things: how race defines and divides us and how the wounds of the past, political and personal, cast shadows across the rest of our lives. These are the two key strands of the play. However, what makes Paul’s writing so special, and what takes it beyond a lot of what we see written and said in our discourse today, is that he doesn’t believe these things are static; we don’t have to be trapped.

“What is remarkable about ‘The Moth’ is that while it confronts some of the darkest and most traumatic elements of our lives, it does so with an incredible Humanism. Paul doesn’t want to go into these things to leave us there or revel in them almost pornographically, he goes into them to heal them. And that is what the play does: it gives hope of some kind of process of healing, however partial, whereby we might be able to free ourselves from the past. It never loses sight of the crimes of history or the need for justice, but it does shine a little light on the way forward, or at least the possibility of a way forward. There is an appeal to our universal humanity, which is profoundly under threat in our turbulent and hate-filled times”.

You’re already part way through a 25 venue tour of the North and Midlands of England. How’s it going so far?

Jake: “You never know how a new play is going to be received, especially one with as powerful and ambitious a set of themes and ideas as this one, so I am delighted to say that it has really found its audience and is striking a chord everywhere it goes. People love it. We are getting full houses, standing ovations and big crowds staying behind for our talk backs. It’s speaking to people in a way that is very rare. The issues it deals with, particularly the scars of history and race, are ones that people want to hear about, especially in a world that seems to be slipping back into vicious bigotry, tribalism and sectarian hate. Because the play tackles this head on but also shows us the possibility of coming through and even find some healing – it is finding its audience”.

You have a long association with this part of the country. How does it feel to be coming back?

Jake: “I grew up in Manchester between the ages of 6 and 21 and went on to work at the Royal Exchange for 7 years between 2001 and 2008, so Manchester was formative for me. Now I live in Durham and have put down roots in the North East – I love it there! I love bringing work back to Manchester as it connects me with my past. The city has changed massively, its almost unrecognisable to how it was growing up as a teenager in the 80s, but I love its vibrancy and energy which just gets more and more intense each year. It will be very special to come back again with ‘The Moth'”.

Are you and Elysium Theatre planning further stage adaptations of the COVID 19 monologues, or are you looking ahead to new projects for the company?

Jake: “There is a third Covid19 Monologue, ‘Fake’ by Chris Barlas, which has been adapted into a stage play, now called ‘Truth’. Like ‘The Moth’ its a powerful, challenging piece of drama which we’d love to find a home for. Some of the others which deal directly with Covid such as ‘One Of A Kind’ cry out for live performance. ‘Oh By The Way, I Hate Myself’ by Hannah Ellis Ryan has had a performance in Manchester, and all the scripts are available for anyone to take up and perform, so we’ll see!

“Next up we are continuing the other strand of our work, Shakespeare. Having done ‘Macbeth’, ‘Othello’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ we’ll be doing ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. We’re the only professional company in the North touring full scale Shakespeare now so that’s very exciting. I’ve been waiting all my life to direct his plays and now, finally, I can”.

As someone whose entire life has involved theatre (Jake’s father, Braham was artistic director at the Royal Exchange from its foundation in 1976 until he retired in 2012), are you able to be optimistic about the art form’s future in this country?

Jake: “I think theatre is really struggling in this country. The UK is still seen as the home of great theatre all around the world. We really are ‘world beating’, the gold standard. Yet years of chronic under funding and lack of investment, the disappearance of the canon of world drama from our education system and the massive blow of Covid has meant British theatre is massively reduced. London is thriving, and there is plenty going on in Manchester, but look everywhere else and there is a serious lack of drama touring. One of the reasons Elysium is doing so well is that in many regions we are all there is if you want to see serious theatre. Regional theatres are either closing or are unable to produce work, so we are not seeing the wealth of theatre the country had in the 60s, 70s, 80s and even the 90s. In short, the world my father worked in. My generation faced far more challenges. The generations coming up even more.

“And yet I think there is a huge hunger in the population to see good drama, drama that excites them and speaks to them, be it classical or modern. Theatre people are resilient. We don’t stop. Give us the resources and we will find the audience. People want the live experience, and in a world in which AI has the potential to replace all human input on our screens, theatre and all live performing arts have the potential to make a comeback as the only authentic human creative experience we can have.

“We have to keep going, battling against the headwind.”

The Moth comes to Lowry, Salford from 10-12 April 2025.

The post Jake Murray on bringing the covid monologues to the stage appeared first on Quays Life.

Following their unique shot-for-shot stage recreation of George A. Romero’s classic 1968 zombie movie – Night of The Living Dead – Remix, imitating the dog and Leeds Playhouse have joined forces again for a radical adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Dracula: The Untold Story promises audiences a glimpse of the famous vampire as never seen before, retelling the gothic horror as a live action, graphic novel from the point of view of the novel’s heroine, Mina Harker.

Niamh Melody met writer and director, Andrew Quick to find out more:

What inspired you to write and direct a production based on Dracula?

Andrew: “Dracula had been on our radar for a few years, we looked at the film Nosferatu but then we got really intrigued by the novel. The person that intrigued us the most was the figure of Mina Harker as she’s the secret author of the novel, really, within the fiction – on the one hand you have all these men and violence and then you’ve got this clever woman on the other side. We got thinking about whether we trust Mina and what her version of the story is. So we started by looking at the end of the novel and what happened in her life after, through the 1900s, as it’s an era that we’re really interested in”.

Did you feel a sense of responsibility as a male director to portray this female perspective accurately?

Andrew: “Theatre is a collaborative process, so you do share a lot of the development but it was about responsibility in one sense. The story’s been told in so many viewpoints so we looked at a new air we could breathe into it and it felt like Mina’s story post Dracula was really interesting, which meant it wasn’t a difficult narrative to build up. And as it’s told in a graphic novel style there isn’t a huge psychological depth as it’s not that type of show – there is a clear character and a story to be told but she’s also a superhero figure really so in that sense she’s both complicated and easier to write.

“We did feel an ethical imperative to get it right so that she has a resistance and attitude to the male world which feels contemporary. And in the novel the author, Bram Stoker seems to worry about the new woman arriving and he has this fear about what women might become, and our Mina in the 20th century is a more proactive version of that possibility.

“And then of course the actors come in and they reshape it with you so it all comes back to being collaborative. In the end theatre is a thing made with a large group of people all chipping in”.

Dracula: The Untold Story combines live stage with graphic novel. What is it that draws you to writing and directing these types of productions?

Andrew: “It’s very difficult in the contemporary world not to acknowledge that technology is how we shape and engage with other people. So the screen feels like a very present dynamic and the company (imitating the dog) has always been interested in our interactions with technology. Now graphic novels are really interesting because they combine literary, the graphic and the cinematic in its storytelling and we’ve always been interested in the style that it uses.

“Part of this idea actually came out of COVID as we didn’t know how restricted we’d be [by the time rehearsals started] so when we first constructed the idea, the graphic novel panels would be made live on stage by the actors and it meant that we could keep the actors separate.

“In the past Dracula is either this charming seducer or he’s a creature from hell with very little character. And we take the latter on in our show, he’s more of a shadow which suits the graphic novel style where you don’t have the classic psychological realism”.

How was bringing the show to life difficult because of COVID and the situation in the past year?

Andrew: “It was difficult – when we actually started rehearsals properly in June we were losing people everyday to isolation and positive contacts and so on. So we were working with all the restrictions but it was very disruptive and none of us knew how it was going to pan out. But luckily the second rehearsal period was when things were opening up slightly so we pulled it together and made what I think is a really great show. By September I knew that it was going to work”.

What do you think audiences can expect from this production?

Andrew: “We’ve got this phrase ‘We want them to be entertained so that they’ll entertain our ideas’ which I think is a really important idea. First of all we want the audience to be engaged by the story and find the theatrical production exciting. At the same time I hope the audience picks up on the ideas that we circulate in the show, one of which is if you take on evil how can you stop becoming evil yourself and that’s the great conundrum of Mina Harker in this show. Then there’s ideas from that about responsibility and evil and ethics and because these are heavy topics they’re not overtly discussed but they are in the background, so I hope the audience get a sense of that”.

Do you hope that theatre will be appreciated more after the events of the last two years?

Andrew: “I hope so. I think people appreciate a lot more about all aspects of life that they took for granted before. Theatre is all about being in the space with people so I’m hoping that people will come back, and they are so far. One of the things the theatre industry did, is it adapted really well to the pandemic. Companies like ours tried really hard to keep freelancers in employment, and by doing that we developed new forms of performance making, which is exciting. One of the things we need to get used to is the idea that this might happen again, in a different way, so an online presence of theatre is important and theatre people are very capable of adapting to that world and showing that we can make great work in all sorts of different contexts”.

Written and directed by imitating the dog’s co-artistic directors Andrew Quick and Pete Brooks, Dracula: The Untold Story will open at The Lowry, Salford Quays where it runs for 2 nights from 12-13 November 2021 before touring. The show is also available to watch digitally on demand. Age guidance 14+.

Read our review of Dracula: The Untold Story at The Lowry.

The post Live action graphic novel brings a new look Dracula to the stage appeared first on Quays Life.

I first met the Moradokmai Theatre Community from Thailand at a Nepalese theatre festival in 2008. The Community was one of the largest groups attending, and they reminded me of a travelling circus, ranging in age from 8 to 50-years-old. Many shivered in the Himalayan chill of early morning as, despite their locally bought woollen helmets, they were dressed for warmer climes.

Chang, the Director and charismatic father figure of the company, sported a thin grey beard, which reached half-way down his chest and long hair, tied back in a pigtail. His sense of humour was infectious and I was drawn to him and Pobchan, his much younger wife whose serene features exuded a Buddha-like calm. Chang, I discovered, was a celebrity in Thailand, well known for his extensive film career. A dynamic jazz musician and actor, he had studied music in America. Both he and Pobchan spoke excellent English though the rest of the company had just a few halting words. We hit it off immediately.

My company of English actors had witnessed the early rising habits of Moradokmai who took over the fourth-floor dinning room of our hotel at 5.30 am every morning where they lit candles to welcome the dawn and conducted a Buddhist ceremony accompanied by drums and a Thai xylophone, before embarking on a strenuous rehearsal which lasted til the rest of the international thespians, rather bleary-eyed from the previous late night theatre and after-show drinking, joined them for breakfast at 8am. They intrigued me. When Chang asked me to go and direct for them I took up the challenge. This was the beginning of a long and creative friendship.

Some 20 years ago Chang moved his acting company out of Bangkok to establish a home school in Klong Luang Patumthani, a rural region 47 kms north of Bangkok. Here his actors and young students could live and learn together, in a self-sufficient community, growing their own food and creating a base for the study of traditional Thai dance music and performance, while welcoming international artists to come and share their skills and experience.

International festivals at Patumthani brought artists from all over the world. The 2010 festival alone, the first years I visited them, featured performers from India, Romania, Germany, Netherlands, Indonesia, Uganda, Nepal, Russia, Estonia, and Slovenia. The 2011 festival also featured artists from France, America and Cambodia.

My first production for the company was Caucasian Chalk Circle. We rehearsed and performed in an open-air circular arena under a black scrim awning looking out over a groove of banana trees and rice fields. Pobchan translated the play into Thai and I worked from a script where both languages sat side-by-side, so we were literally always on the same page.

I introduced the script only gradually as the actors became more and more familiar with the story line, and after many scene-by-scene discussions on character motivations and the underlying theme of the play. I have now directed for the company a number of times using this technique. This January 2020 marked my fifth visit after an absence of several years.

In additional to international links, the company has a schools’ network throughout Thailand, where their actors teach dance and drama and invite the schools to perform at their home base. They also work in prisons and probation centres. In 2013, I worked for them at a probation centre in Songkhla province where we dramatised a short story that had won a South East Asia writers award. The play was then performed with two other adaptations compiled by a Spanish and Nepalese director – the trio entitled, “Thai stories through the eyes of outsiders”. Subsequently my play was performed all over Thailand.

The company travel extensively. In 2012 they came to England for the Contacting the World festival and a subsequent tour. They have extensive links in Eastern Europe where their students have gone to study in a different musical tradition.

Future tours are now dependent on the control of the pandemic – fortuitously as it turned out, I managed a month with them this January getting back well before lockdown. This latest challenge was to create a performance from a play written by a Thai playwright who had attended a playwriting course at Moradokmai. The play, Guiding Ghosts, was about a generational struggle between two brothers over ancestral traditions.

Thai does not translate easily into English and my first task was to unravel the meaning of the play. I worked extensively on the script with the playwright, who is head of the faculty of Film and TV at Rangsit University. This was a skill sharing exercise to keep the play true to its conception but utilising what I could bring from a western theatre tradition.

Working with actors who live together is fascinating. Because they know each other so well (some younger actors were born here from acting parents) their responses are instinctive. Once they have understood the nature of the play the speed at which they create their performance is exceptional. While progress is slower with some of the younger members of the cast, I never ceased to be impressed with their skills and hard work.

I have learned from working at Moradokmai to expect the unexpected, never make assumptions and be endlessly adaptable. Over the course of 27 days, I had a series of cast changes and lulls between rehearsals when the actors were performing elsewhere or assisting at a massive three day music festival, a huge Guru theatre blessing ceremony, two Thai weddings of company members and preparations for a major American tour which was to be cut short by the pandemic.

They also busk in the night markets several times a week; a surprisingly successful funding stream for the company, which I guess, is also temporarily curtailed. We travelled to Rangsit University to perform the play to film students and to Korat to perform in their open-air theatre space. (The company also has land in Loei province and Chang Rai.) I also recorded the whole play in English in their sound studio.

I take back memories of their beautiful new traditional performance space looking out over a large lake where the geese woke me with their loud honking every morning; the flotilla of little ducks clucking their way down the banana grove en-route to gain scraps from the kitchen; performing under the trees to the noise of bird song; the sound of the Thai xylophone being practised over and over again; endless performances to watch and comment on; the company’s quirky new tap dancing skills, and hearing the beat of the drums at 5 am when the community start their day.

Much has changed from the early days when Chang and his family lived in a mud hut by the side of a lake and I lived in a series of rotting cabins besieged by mosquitoes, frogs and once a poisonous black centipede, and woken daily at 3 am by a cockerel.

This year I lived in an adapted container with air con – a huge upgrade, and the company is now building a black box theatre, has new dormitories and a sound studio. “Give me a couple of years and I will build you a permanent house,” said Chang before I left. Pandemic willing I intend to take him up on the offer.

Read our interview with author Alex Wheatle

The post Drama By The Rice Fields: Working With The Moradokmai Theatre Community appeared first on Quays Life.