Our Public House: Development
Artistic Director Josephine Burton and Senior Producer Cristina Catalina share insights from this year's development of Our Public House, set to premiere in 2025/26. In the journal-style blog, they delve into the creative journey, detailing the meticulous research and dedication that Dash Arts pours into every production.
From Josephine:
The year began with an intense week at the National Theatre Studio with some wonderful actors, writer Barney Norris, musician Nick Pynn and myself. Barney and I came into the room with some ideas about what the show could be about. And over the course of the week, playing with improvisation, the speeches from our workshops and some songs, a script began to emerge. It was a glorious way to start the next stage of the project: our inquiry into how the more than 150 speeches written and delivered by participants from across England over the last year could inform a play about who we are today as a country.
So, since January, Barney has been drafting and finessing the script. We had a wonderful few days with composer Jonathan Walton and Nick Pynn in Stratford East in April discussing how music will play a part in the production and how it might do some of the heavy lifting by carrying the lyrics from the speeches. Our conversations slightly shifted the way we understood the story and how we needed to tell it.
We’ve also been continuing to run speech-making workshops all year. I’m continuing to learn from them which is in turn having a huge impact on the script and its future staging. Crucially our production includes participants alongside the professional cast. Every night on stage, as part of the play wherever it tours, we will hear the speeches and calls to action from the local participants we’ve worked with. So it’s essential that we continue to listen to people, support their writing and build relationships to build the ensemble cast we’ll need to pull off the vision!
From Cristina….
So here we are, Josephine and I, on a train again. We’re continuing our journey across England to meet with people from all walks of life, and ask them a simple question: what do you want to change now, to make the future better? It’s not a typical icebreaker, and not without a perceived tinge of naivety or idealism. But as we spend time again with familiar faces who did our workshops last year, and welcome new ones, supporting them to write their own political speeches, it’s clear: given the tools and the platform, people have a lot to say, with meaningful calls to action, and they get a lot out of it.
At Manchester Deaf Centre, everyone smiles as they walk in. We’re joined by Emily, a deaf actor who today will co-run the workshop with us, with politics and rhetoric academics by our side - this time observing and using their expertise to better understand how we can help connect the deaf community with more politicians to enact change.
After a good round of games to counter nerves or the expectation that what we might do will be ‘hard’, or ‘not for me’, we dive in. BSL interpreters Jude and Richard do a fantastic job in turning everything we say into beautiful sign language, using expressions that will make sense like “pay attention” instead of “speech” – as the English language is so full of idioms, obliqueness, un-literal expressions and assumed shared contexts which can be quite confusing. The day unfolds in spectacular ways, with every single person rising to the challenge: Lisa talks about her experience in A&E, Mark and many others outline their struggles at airports or on trains, John expresses his frustration about using the gym, and Bharat, always the football fan, talks of his dream of enjoying a match without missing key announcements! All suggest practical and inspiring solutions, from visual signage in public spaces to easier access to BSL interpreters in healthcare settings, and basic BSL being taught in schools - something the hearing community can benefit from too!
We end on a high with lovely feedback from the participants:
“A big thanks to everyone for involving us in today’s session – you’ve given us the skills to express ourselves and try and tune our experiences to enable hearing audiences to understand [them]. I’ve got the confidence to advocate for myself and empower myself to actually go and fight for my rights and raise this within a political forum.”
Another group we return to are in Newham, hosted in a bright room at Theatre Royal Stratford East. Éyum-Pricilla, whose previous speech we heard in our London event last year, writes this time about body image, and the pressures young people feel to ‘fit in’, going to extreme lengths like using a diabetes drug for weight loss. Michael talks about the harm done by incorrectly labelling neurodiverse black kids as “naughty”, calling for more training and resources; Devika, also a previous participant, encourages us to breathe more efficiency into the healthcare system, and Fatima has solutions for the bin crisis that will not only let children breathe fresh air, but bring communities together.
Together with our other participants, Sue and Jenny, and actor Mark too, we try out a hustings scene – a first! – which gives us a flavour of how the participation scene will work in the eventual production as it tours. Taking turns to play a more combative MP, and then more genuine, Mark sees his remarks well matched by the participants, whose researched arguments and strong calls for action finessed during the morning session are now proving easy to reach for in an articulate and persuasive manner – move aside Etonians!
Back to Josephine…
At the end of May, we spent an exhilarating whirlwind of a few days working with actors and 7 of our amazing participants at Home in Manchester. We staged some of Barney’s script and performed some songs created by the ensemble and led by musician Matt Hill. And we staged a town hall event where our participants, who’d kindly joined us from Liverpool, London, Coventry and Manchester, presented their case for what needed to change, alongside the actors. It was a joyous moment to bring together the different stages of the project - the research and the real people, the drama and the fiction - and see how they might mesh together to create a work of theatre that has the potential to be really quite extraordinary.
Barney and I are still creating, informed by all the workshops and the learnings they’ve given us. And now we’ve got a General Election to throw into the mix. We always knew that participating in a national election would become part of our creative process - particularly because before Barney even joined the creative team, he’d signed up as Green Party Candidate for Salisbury! It’s impossible for me not to listen to and analyse the speeches of our politicians and the rhetoric they use without thinking about all the amazing eloquent activists we’ve had the privilege to work with this year across the country. I wish I could be voting for some of them, or could be a constituent member of Salisbury!
Find out more and get involved in our workshops: dasharts.org.uk/workshops
You can hear some of their voices plus Barney and I in conversation about the creative process in our most recent episode of our Public House Series: Elections Onstage and Off - click below.
