A message from Amy
We were wondering in rehearsals yesterday whether there were a bunch of medieval players facing the same dilemma as us back in the 1300s when the great plague hit. Surely ‘the show must go on’ no matter what, hasn’t that always been our theatre motto? But today it’s official the show will not go on, the theatres have closed their doors.
Our show HERE, that has been made with brilliant humans from all over the world over the last two years, and has come together in the rehearsal room with an exceptionally lush cast and creative team over the last 3 weeks, will sadly not be shared with our audiences for opening night on Thursday, or for its entire run at Northern Stage. The theatres have had to take the call to keep us all safe, and together they have made those difficult decisions and are working hard to make sure the theatre industry can continue after this crisis. We absolutely support their decision although it’s obviously gutting for the team involved with our show. The work involved in researching, writing, producing, funding, programming, rehearsing, translating and designing a play, creating lights, sound, AV, building set, making costumes and props (including books that actually light up – sorry spoiler alert!) marketing, PR, organising a tour and learning sooo many lines is not to be underestimated.
We are a theatre company of sanctuary and we have not just made a show but we have brought together a community, a family of people from all over the world, Geordies and those newly arrived here – now honorary Geordies – who have come together, made friends, been creative together and who look out for each other. This show has not just been created by a load of theatre makers but by a huge amount of different people who have each individually inspired something that our writer Lindsay has woven in to our beautiful script.
So actually, yes! THE SHOW MUST GO ON – We are still finishing our rehearsals, as we are determined we will finish what we started. We are busy in tech rehearsal this week (our own brilliant self-isolation, a creative quarantine of artists in a black box!) We are lucky we are all well and healthy and have pretty much been only in each other’s company for the past month. Finishing the tech for act 1, seeing the beautiful lighting design on the set together with the words and soundtrack and our actor’s performances tonight made me well up. There is a moving story that needs to be told, a story of Newcastle and the world. So, although it can’t happen now we want to assure all the people who we wanted to share this story with that we will do everything in our power to make it happen in the future – the Byker residents who were all coming on a coach trip to see a story set in their community, to the groups of students coming to learn about theatre for social change, to the refugee and asylum seeking support agencies who were bringing their staff, volunteers and people using their services, to our families, friends and fellow creatives who were supporting the project, to the people we don’t know who booked a ticket and took a punt on our show, to those whose opinions we hope to challenge and the critics who we hope will like it. Be assured HERE will be on stage sometime soon. We are working on plans with Northern Stage and our other tour venues, and hopefully HERE will continue its journey around the UK later this Spring. We will post updates on this as soon as we have more info.
For now we have taken the decision to postpone all of our participatory activity with our Arriving group and Troupe. We’ll be continuing to keep in touch with all of the amazing people we work with, and once we come out of our black box theatre bubble and our technical rehearsals are complete this week look out for us on social media and in your inboxes as we are planning how we can stay connected during this time of shut down. A time of crisis is a time of creativity. In theatre we tell stories and when more do you need a good story than when you can’t get out and about as much. So watch this space. Big love and wash those hands again!