Roots and Rootlessness

The sea at Combe Martin, just along the South West Coast Path from Berrynarbor where our first Tiny Heroes was performed this week.

​We opened Tiny Heroes in Devon this week, under the aegis of the wonderful Beaford. They co-commissioned the first version of the show, so it means a lot to go back and open this final version with them three years later. It went incredibly well. I’m delighted. I’m also knackered: I write this having driven for eight hours today (Sunday), from Devon to Leeds to Lancaster.
 
I love rural touring. I love meeting a community in its own place, a community that may have almost nothing in common beyond their shared investment in that place. I love rural communities because their remoteness can mean that they’re that much more reliant on one another despite their differences. In many respects these communities can appear homogenous, and in many demographic respects this is troublingly accurate (I am aware that it's much easier for the feelings I describe to arise in a white man). Even so, it doesn't take long for this surface homogeneity to dissolve into surprisingly different perspectives and experiences.

And most of all, I love the welcome and the hospitality. My schtick is all about hosting, so it's fun to do shows where I'm so manifestly a guest. The space itself and the community's pre-existing relationship with that space do a lot of the work of hosting. Even more so than in any of my other work, I can't get away with pretending to be anywhere other than here, because everyone instinctively knows they have permission to interrupt, like your grandad heckling at your wedding.
 
It seems fitting to have headed off on a rural tour straight from Slung Low’s new place. There’s nothing remotely rural about Holbeck, but still, Slung Low's approach has a lot in common with that prevalent on the rural circuit. The importance of hospitality, of shared meals, of a sense that community comes not just from shared interests but from a shared place. We can’t build a world together if we only ever interact with people whose interests correspond with our own. We have to meet on shared ground.
 
But I’m not going to spend too much time singing the praises of Slung Low. I did that last week, and will surely do so again.
 
While rehearsing this week I stayed at the home of Dick Bonham (among his other qualifications, the director of Going Viral and The Price of Everything). With his partners-in-crime Howard and Choq, Dick recently opened a new venue, The Constitutional, in Farsley, west Leeds. And while I’m generally sceptical about the practice of opening new venues left, right and centre (hemhemthefactoryhemhem), The Constitutional is exactly how this sort of thing should be done. It’s the latest development in nearly fifteen years of work deeply embedded in the community of Farsley. For ten years, Dick and Howard (and later, Choq) ran an annual street festival in Farsley, where they all live. It was made in collaboration with the local community. At its peak ten thousand people showed up. 
 
Then “the people who brought you Farsley festival” started a monthly night in an old mill building, called Trouble at Mill. They put on a piece of theatre and a band, Dick and Howard emceed, there was good food and a great bar. It was basically A Good Night Out (complete with Soviet-propaganda-style marketing). And  the local community had learned to trust these people, so they showed up in force. The first year there was some ACE subsidy. For the next four, they didn’t need it. And now, from once a year through once a month, at the Constitutional, they’ve gone to 3-4 times a week. 
 
You can’t do this unless you’ve been having a conversation that whole time. If you just build it without asking anyone if they want it, why the fuck would they come?

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Vicky Brazier and Claire-Marie Seddon, the team from Tiny Heroes, whose praises I should be singing more in these posts. Next time. The image was taken on the coast near Berrynarbor and it represents the hell that is touring.

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(I’ve been thinking a lot about community this week partly because I’ve been rural touring and rehearsing at Slung Low and staying at Dick’s. Also partly because I feel the lack of a community in my life at the moment. I’ve felt it for more than five years and I’m incredibly jealous of Dick’s embeddedness in Farsley. There are loads of reasons for my famished, shallow roots at the moment, and some of them are currently a bit raw to talk about in public. But given how much of my work is invested in the value of a community working together to make a difference in their place, it’s a bitter pill that I’m no part of any such community. There are loads of things I want to do, but for the raw reasons and others, it hasn’t been able to happen. Watch this space. I hope.)
 




Show of the week: it was last week really, but I don’t see much at the moment so I’m banking them where I can. We had a giddily expensive day out in Edinburgh last Saturday to see Touching the Void and it was a twisty, psychologically acute version of the vertiginous nightmare. David Greig has taken huge liberties in some ways and been startlingly faithful in others and it adds up to a terrific shift of perspective on a well-told tale.
 
Telly of the week: that last episode of Les Miserables was terrific, wasn’t it? That lingering final shot of children begging in the street: our heroes Marius and Cosette may be happily married, but so what, we still need a revolution. I said last week that I feel the need for optimism in the discourse now more than ever and my love for this bleak ending may seem to contradict that. I don’t think it does. Optimism doesn’t mean a happy ending, it means an ending that suggests happiness will one day be possible. 
 
Radio of the week: everyone was rightly full of love for Bob Mortimer on Desert Island Discs and I commend that episode to you if you missed it. Once you’ve listened to it, go back and listen to this wonderful episode of Chain Reaction in which Mortimer interviews Vic Reeves. It’s deliriously, perfectly silly. It's so far from being like any art I'd ever argue for as to make recommending it irresponsible. And yet here I am. I’ve listened to it eight or nine times and will do so regularly until I die. It's the greatest comfort. It reminds me of home. It feels a little bit like love.

​I'm afraid of the level of self-revelation this represents.

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