EF: The idea of doing two plays in rep is something I’ve thought about for a long time, and I’ve come close to doing it several times, but the impetus became very real during that first lockdown in 2020 when the whole artform was suddenly in peril. We were forced to question everything – which is not necessarily a bad thing. Terrifying, but interesting. One of the things I found myself thinking a lot about was the relationship between process and outcome, and the fact that if you always work in the same way you’ll always get the same kind of theatre and the same kinds of stories. There are many problems with this, the first of which is that sameness and homogeneity are a dangerous delusion. But also the world had just changed very suddenly at that time, and theatre was going to have to change too, there was no choice.

So the idea of rep came from that fact that we had to find new ways to work, and from the sense that we had to find new kinds of stories and forms that might reflect the new realities we’re living in. So this rep model isn’t about going back to an old “repertory” idea of making theatre – though the idea of ensemble is one I love very much – it’s more about looking for a way forward that is about artistic collaboration, about a wider view of a changing world, about an idea of theatre-going not as a one-off night of entertainment but as a returning act of shared imagination…

HG: I was still quite new to the company when we went into that first lockdown (I began my Andrew Cameron Fellowship 5 weeks beforehand) and my memories of that time are marked by enormous conversations, and sometimes arguments about how the theatre, the world, this company needed to change. Nothing was off the table. It was both overwhelming and exhilarating; change to the known models and methods seemed not only inevitable but also essential. There were lots of big ideas that we tossed around in the Artistic and Programming team at that time and then later, in the Artists at Work groups. I think at one point we discussed the possibility of doing 5 shows on one set! The situation continued to evolve and so did our response. Somewhere along the road we ended up with these 2 plays that somehow belong together. In a strange way the strange times made that possible. And I think that’s because many things, both good and bad, seemed more possible than they had ever been. The Rep Season is an attempt to meet that sense of possibility in good faith, to work with the past to imagine a path forward… In that sense I think our Rep Season is a great act of optimism, conceived of at a time when the world was telling us to hunker down. That was and remains as good a reason as any to make the leap and do it.

HG: The great link between these two plays for me is also the reason to stage them right now. It’s that both are fundamentally about a struggle to hold faith – in an idea, in a mission, in a vision, in each other… Both explore what it costs to believe in and to fight for a better, fairer world. They honour and celebrate the forgotten people who kept up that fight. The people who, at great personal cost, made space in society so that we can think, speak, act, and love in different ways. Together, these two plays show us that the pursuit of change like that is a rebellion that has sustained over hundreds of years and continues today. From a civil war in the 1600s, to Kings Cross in the 70s, to us at Belvoir now. My hope is that the Rep project as a whole raises a placard in the mind that says, ‘I can’t believe we’re still fighting this sh*t’. 

Wayside Bride pays tribute to a community of local heroes, outsiders, and rebels. And it’s about love – real, pure and simple. One character in the play describes Wayside brides and grooms as ‘the people who loved their partner so much that they were willing to go against society to marry them’. Before rehearsals I read an email from the Wayside Chapel, written by their current pastor Jon Owen. In it he wrote about a wedding, a couple’s third attempt following a number of COVID cancellations. Upon finally seeing his partner as a bride the groom was made so speechless that Jon had to break down the vows into bite sized pieces so they could get through it. Jon writes, ‘Their union is a gentle reminder of a divinity that still exists in an all too often cynical world’. And that’s what this play is to me. If a union is a kind of spell, a charm to keep people together, then this play is full of that magic. A magic that hopes to prevent the cynical, the narrow-minded and pessimistic forces that would have us believe that we are not connected to one another. 

In Light Shining in Buckinghamshire Caryl Churchill takes as her subject the people that the history books don’t write about. When we began work on the production, I read a book that Churchill read while she was writing this play, The World Turned Upside Down by Christopher Hill. In it Hill quotes a lot of remarkable writing from the period, some of which Caryl has used in the play. One quote I have returned to repeatedly comes from Richard Hooker, a priest and theologian. He described the people of the period as, ‘men whose minds are of themselves as dry fuel’. There is a fire that catches in this play, and it is in the minds and imaginations of the people. Fuelled by speech, vision and action it grows into an inferno that spreads across a nation until it is all but suffocated by those who were supposed to lead their people to freedom. But a small ember did survive and sustain itself, to be reignited later to finish what they started. As Churchill says in her introduction, ‘…their voices are surprisingly close to ours’. We still have unfinished business here on this stolen land. 

EF: We had already committed to doing Wayside Bride before COVID, but COVID made the play even more special because it’s about community, and in the autumn of 2020 we suddenly had very little of that. And we suddenly realised just how fragile and necessary it is. Community is not a gift of government or a strategic plan or a sentimental bank ad, it’s a living thing that has to be grown and sustained by groups of people who go out of their way to keep this or that little place going – a theatre, a drop-in centre, a sports club… And without those places and those people there’s no dignity and no joy in our cities. COVID made that very clear, and of course the threat COVID posed to all forms of community was very close to home for us at Belvoir. So Wayside Bride was always going to be a key work coming out of COVID.

Light Shining had always been a favourite play of mine, but because it’s a difficult play for both artists and audiences I’d always balked at putting it on – it doesn’t have a “story” in the usual sense of the word, its central scene is a verbatim account of an arcane debate about the foundations of law in 17th century England… But on a hunch we did a reading of the play during the first lockdown as part of our Artists at Work program and it was a revelation. Like Wayside Bride, Churchill’s text quotes and draws on real voices, and it was exhilarating to hear those long-ago voices from a past time of crisis speaking to us in this time of crisis, and it felt very close to us. So many of the big questions of the 17th century are unanswered today, and so much of the crisis in our democracies and our economies today stems back to those unanswered questions. So the content of the play was revelatory. But so too was the form. Churchill’s unconventional pastiche of historical documents and devised scenes and post-Brechtian situations felt far more true-to-life than the neat shape of a conventional play. One of the things both plays have in common is that they are breaking apart the old orthodox forms of the well-made play in an attempt to hold a mirror up to the un-well-made world we actually live in. Interestingly both of the writers are women and feminists and outsiders…

But the leap of imagination was the idea of doing them together. The two plays are very different, but at heart they’re about the same thing: who gets a say and who doesn’t. And each play enriches and contextualises the other. One is local and familiar and full of heart and generosity; the other is historical and foreign and challenging. And yet, despite the fact they were written independently nearly half a century apart, there are characters and lines in each play that could well be from the other. And in a very direct way, via the eruption of theology and social action in the 17th century, the real Wayside Chapel is only possible because of the innovations made by all those people portrayed in Churchill’s play; you could even go so far as to say that Alana’s play is only possible because of the dramaturgical innovations made by Caryl Churchill 50 years ago (although let’s not downplay Alana’s own remarkable originality). The two plays are connected by long, deep chains of thought and experience and struggle. There’s even a sense that the long scene at the end of Light Shining could well be taking place at Wayside today…

EF: The secret actually is having two directors. Theatre is always a collaboration and being part of a duo has really allowed the conversation around the work to extend and deepen, especially in those early stages before you cast and design the play. When you’re in a team you’re able to talk out the thoughts you’d normally have alone in the shower or walking to work in the morning. These plays are about coming out into speech and action and that’s always easier when you’re in a team. But I also love history, and I’m very much against the historical solipsism of so much contemporary culture, by which I mean the way we are working so hard to ignore and forget the past. It’s a very silly thing to do. Yes, a lot of what we’re experiencing in the 21st century is unprecedented, but a lot of it is not, and it’s consoling to spend time with the past, and to see what is common to now and then. There’s wisdom in it. So that’s been a pleasure, really. And of course Caryl Churchill and Alana Valentine had already done the hard work of divining those voices from another time, so we have the great fortune of working with texts that have already been processed and formed. In terms of design and the creative elements of the shows, that has been a real adventure, to be sure, but the foundational conversations with Mikey and Ella on set and costume were among the most rewarding I’ve ever had. The very difficulty of the task is the whetstone, you really have to sharpen your ideas against the challenge you’ve given yourself. And we have. We knew that the set needed to be a communal space that evoked the unfinished business of making a society which accepts and allows all people. But how we use that space is very different in each play. The chairs were an early key offer from Mikey in how to establish those differences. And of course each play has very particular requirements, so we just had to be inventive and find solutions within the constraints of the set. That’s been a lot of fun, really.

Similarly, the costume task for each play is also very specific. There’s a delicious, magical game of then and now at work in Wayside, and we always knew that it would be the job of costuming to play that game – especially given that clothes are so written into the play. Light Shining is a much more challenging costume task conceptually, but the form requires the actors to stay on stage so it was really a process of essentialising each figure so that they could become many different kinds of people very quickly and easily.

The songs are written into Light Shining, but the composition is all Alyx’s work. Alyx brought us some central European folk songs as a reference, and the sense of deep memory in those songs felt very apt, the way they carry both struggle and hope but with the balance sometimes going this way, sometimes that. I love Alyx’s compositions, and they’ve really helped to form the overall shape of the work.

HG: I think the project has only been possible because there are two directors. The scope and scale of what we are trying to speak to artistically is so enormous and multifaceted, that only having one mind to helm the ship (so to speak) would be dishonest. I am enormously grateful to have had a co-director to talk it out with, to collaborate with on the many challenges we’ve been faced with staging these two plays. But we’d be nowhere without our team. The thinking we did with Michael and Ella in those early days on the set and costume design really set the agenda for work to continue. A Rep Season is an enormous design task that stretches you into unfamiliar territory, Mikey and Ella have helped us immeasurably to extend our ideas for these productions. I love Alyx’s music, it acts as a time machine, a rallying call, an elegy and much more across both shows (one of which she also performs in). Our stage management team performs miracles daily to keep us all on task. The cast have been heroic. And of course, all of it wouldn’t have been possible if Alana hadn’t taken the leap of imagination with us. 

EF: The very first line of Light Shining talks about “action, word, thought or faint motion less than any of these”, which describes a sort of layer-cake of the faculties that make up a human being. The faint stirrings of something within, brought to thought and then to speech, lead to action in the world. It’s a wonderful description, and two wonderful ideas follow from it. First, the idea that intuitions and imaginings can make the world. As the late and great David Graeber said, “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Second, the idea that a person needs to be allowed to exercise the full gamut of their being, from faint motion right up to action and back again. Too many people are forced down into bottom layers of their own existence. Both plays take very seriously the idea that we have a responsibility to make space for all people to be able to come out into word and action. These are both plays about people breaking through into thought and action. In doing so those people are remaking themselves, and they are remaking the world. I find their courage and imagination inspiring and beautiful.

EF: Yes but it changes every other day.

HG: Ditto. 

EF: Two imaginations are always better than one. There are sort of two parts to directing a show – there’s the work in the rehearsal room, doing the scene work, on the floor, with the actors; and there’s the work before and around the rehearsal room, with the creatives and the production team, where you’re solving the staging and the worlds of the plays. That second part of the work is quite challenging on these plays – both writers really set some real staging challenges. So opening that work up into a broader collaboration than normal has been exciting, and I think it has probably allowed us to be more intrepid than if there were just one director. In terms of the rehearsal room, we work with a kind of pilot/co-pilot setup – Hannah leads the work for Wayside and I lead the work for Light Shining. It remains a collaboration, and we talk very openly about everything, but we keep the actual scene work and text work quite focused.

HG: Because they are both so different! And it is genuinely thrilling to watch these artists test themselves against the style and scope of these two plays. I think it will be a real treat for audiences to see that. 

Throughout the process we have talked about how Light Shining is a work that targets the head and the gut, whereas Wayside goes for the heart. Together, you get a total experience.