PAUSE  

Part of Pandemic Songs: a very strange year in the life of Unfolding Theatre.

Spoken by Alex Elliott, Alison Carr, Annie Rigby, Garry Lydon, Michael Barrass and Ross Millard.

Kevin. Kevin has been working all through the pandemic, down at the port with some amazing characters. I’m gonna write a song about you, he tells them, I’m gonna make you famous. At home he sits with their words and his guitar, playing a lolloping 12-bar blues. He wishes he could bring this riff to Unfolding Theatre: reckons he’d get more done on his song in two minutes with them than he’s managed on his own in a year. 

Dennis. Dennis is Kevin’s brother. He plays music too. One of the things that’s been keeping me sane over this pandemic, says Dennis, is meeting up with people on Zoom. Sometimes three or four zooms a week, sharing stories, poetry, or everyone with guitars and ukuleles, one person playing their song and the others on mute, listening and playing along. Or, when the weather is good, sneaking down to the seafront to play together outside. Everything's been so creative, he says, and Zoom’s been an absolute godsend.

The backstory. Kevin and Dennis were among the people in Sunderland who joined Unfolding Theatre to make Putting the Band Back Together in 2016. This motley crew of musicians, some rusty, some practised, some learning, different in age and especially politics, came to be known as the House Band, some even travelling to perform with the show outside Sunderland, becoming the company’s friends.

Annie. Annie is the artistic director of Unfolding Theatre. She wanted to build on those relationships formed with the House Band by making another show together. Because Putting the Band Back Together was structured a bit like an album, this new work had the working title B-Sides. It was going to be about some big event, she says, some fictional happening in the near future that would completely transform the way societies and communities related to each other. That was her idea.

Alison. Alison is a playwright and until B-Sides had never worked with Unfolding Theatre before. Her first thought was that this new play shouldn’t have a simple logic: the “big event” should remain mysterious and ambiguous, a thing that meant different things to different people. 

The before. March 2020 and the team – Annie, Alex, Ross, Alison, Garry and Michael from Unfolding Theatre, and 18 members of the House Band – gathered for three workshops in the Fans Museum in Sunderland. When I think about being in a room together, says Annie, it was pure joy: everybody so happy to see each other again, loads of new members joining and bringing new energy, but also really enjoying the atmosphere of it all. 

Alex. Alex is an associate artist with Unfolding Theatre. A door opened in those workshops, he says, to things we hadn’t done before. We were offering opportunities to improvise something, or make a soundscape: to think about things differently. Before we’d come to the House Band with traditional things: this is a song we’d like you to learn, these are the parts. We were on the cusp of writing quite different material, and writing it with them, with people contributing text as well as musical ideas. 

Ross. Ross performs with a couple of bands – the Futureheads, Frankie and the Heartstrings – and was the central axis of the House Band. We were just getting used to being back in the room together, he says, when the pandemic happened. If we’d been a bit further down the road with the idea, if we'd been a bit more developed in terms of what the piece was going to look like, then we might have been able to keep the momentum going. But we weren't quite ready to go when everything shut down. 

The first lockdown. April 2020 and the Unfolding Theatre team sent out text messages asking if anybody in the House Band would like a chat, even just to catch up. It was clear, says Alex, that people were having to make quite big adjustments: they appreciated the fact that we were around and still wanted to keep in touch, but there was a common understanding that things were going to be very different. When Alex left the message, says Dennis, I was in a bit of a funny place and didn’t really want to talk to anybody. You can’t help what’s going on inside your head, and I was trying to find out how to cope with this stuff. I’m quite a sociable person and being inside, it was weird. 

But then there’s Bob. Bob came along to one of the Multiverse Lab conversations about health, and Alex remembers him saying something really nice. I just wanted to let you know I was around, said Bob, and to connect with you and support in whatever way I can. He joined the conversation about health knowing that if wasn’t going to lead to anything specific: it was just about contributing.  

We’re a theatre company: it’s in our DNA to keep pushing. That’s Annie. Our immediate reaction, says Ross, was to try and continue chipping away at an idea that had a sense of positivity and joyousness in it, even though there was a starkness to everything shutting down. We created a Facebook group, says Annie, and sent the House Band little creative tasks, but the thing we kept finding is that they weren’t really interested – it wasn’t being in the room. Ross says the same: working remotely was really interesting, and what we produced was notably different – there’s a piece of music he remembers in particular, made by Garry, another Unfolding Theatre associate artist, digitally manipulated to make time stretch, a really beautiful idea, and not something that would have come out of being in the room together – but even so, this wasn’t the process I was used to with Unfolding Theatre, says Ross. That company is very much about being in a room all together.

Dropbox. There was a plan, early on, for Annie and Alison and Ross and Alex and Garry and Michael to work in Dropbox together. The idea, says Annie, was to take things we’d done in those three workshops, create something, and then put your thing in the folder of the next person alphabetically, and then they would respond to it, and put it in the next person’s folder, and so on. But when you’re so used to being together in a room, how do you navigate online? After setting the challenge – this was hilarious, says Annie – it quickly became apparent that nobody understood how the mechanism was supposed to work. Some people’s Dropbox folders had nothing arriving – and some had everybody’s content in. On the plus side, misunderstanding the instruction is a useful part of the creative process. And, says Alison, it was nice to do something without a huge amount of pressure. It gave you a bit of freedom because ideas were coming from different places: you weren't having to dredge it all up from yourself, you could bounce off other things.

Carol. Carol was someone who responded really positively to the creative challenges, says Annie. She sent in quite a few bits of text, weaving this into some other creative work she was doing. She even started running her own creative writing sessions, supporting others through the lockdown. 

The deserted ballroom. This image bloomed, says Alison, from something that one of the Facebook group had contributed. Annie remembers being worried that the deserted ballroom territory was all really melancholy: we don’t want to make something that’s too heartbreaking at this time, do we? But it’s not heartbreaking, says Kevin: it’s about resurgence. It’s about somebody getting in that theatre and there’s already somebody in there, playing a bit of resonant music, and a gradual build up of people walking in the theatre, making music and making joy. 

Ian. Ian was one of the newest people to join the house band; he’s a very skilled guitarist, says Alex, played some lovely Beatles. In the autumn, Ian and Bob and Alex started forming a plan, to book a get together in the Cricket Club. We didn’t email anyone about it, says Annie, because we didn’t want to promise anything. And then the case rate went back up, and it wasn’t going to be possible.

But why didn’t they just meet up on Zoom? It’s a technical issue, says Annie, to do with latency. With the kind of music we played, which was about Ross introducing a little rhythm, or a little melody, and building on that, that just isn’t possible on Zoom. We could have just had a social, Annie realises. But it didn’t cross my mind. 

The joke. Remember the thing that Annie said? That B-sides was going to be about some big event, some fictional happening in the near future that would completely transform the way societies and communities related to each other. So my joke, she says, was: that’s now happened. And where does that leave the show?

Dreams. At night Kevin dreams of the deserted theatre, and he’s banging at the door, let us in, let us in. Dennis has always had vivid dreams, he says. Dreams where he’s flying, he’s flown all over the place. Flying on the astral plane.

Alison’s to do list. Every week, Alison would write Unfolding Theatre at the top of her to do list. And then she would feel guilty about this project that needed to happen, but she wouldn’t know what to do to make it happen. I’m the only new person in this project, says Alison, I’ve never worked in a collaborative way before. So this is all new to me. And I’m not saying the pandemic has been a good thing, but it let me catch my breath a little bit, let me have a little break.

Sinkholes. In December 2020 the team found a way to be in a room together. It was just a week of kicking around a few ideas, says Ross, but it felt much more like the beginnings of a proper Unfolding Theatre project again. We got so much more done, says Alison: you can write a few quick ideas, and then some music – there’s a shorthand that you can have in the room. It was in this week, says Annie, that Alison started putting together a structure so that when the team next come back together, they could start populating it. Now the idea is of a street holding lots of different characters, and a sinkhole opens up on the street that means different things to each of them. I’m a bit obsessed with sinkholes, says Alison, I’m glad I’ve crowbarred them into this project. You didn’t have to, says Annie: it just opened up – like a real sinkhole.

The fact that we would have done the show by now absolutely blows my mind. That’s Alison, although Annie says something very similar. I’m pleased, says Annie – not that there’s been a pandemic, that’s been horrendous and I’ve hated it – but I do think the piece is going to be better for the extra time. And I’m really excited about what we’re going to make with this new energy of coming back together. Alex feels the same: I can’t wait to see the members of the House Band, he says. But it’s not going to be a case of going back to where we were. There’s going to be a process of finding one another, discovering what it is we really want. There’s been a lot of talk, says Annie, about when we create new stories in this time: do they have to be about the pandemic? My feeling is, everything is going to be about it. Everything is.

Press PLAY to find out more about the work that remained constant through the pandemic year.

Press STOP to find out more about the work that couldn’t happen.

Press REWIND to find out about another rich and deep relationship that unfolded during lockdown. 

Press FAST FORWARD to find out more about where Unfolding Theatre are heading next.