STOP  

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

Spoken by Alex Elliott.

To some, this part of the story will be painfully familiar.

Hold On Let Go, Unfolding Theatre’s main touring show for 2019/2020, had done its holding and was ready to go. It had already been performed at Summerhall in Edinburgh as part of the 2019 fringe festival, and in a couple of previews at Battersea Arts Centre in London. It was ready for its national performances, and its homecoming to Newcastle. The stage manager had signed a contract for March and May 2020; its performers, Luca Rutherford and Alex Elliott, were poised.

And then – nothing. “The week began and there was that strange announcement advising the public not to go to theatres, but not saying theatres have to close,” says Annie Rigby, Unfolding Theatre’s artistic director. What was being made ambiguous by the government was clear to the company: “We knew there was no way it was going to happen.” So began the process of what came to be called “unproducing”: of touring dates being rescheduled, or cancelled altogether.

It’s a process that many producers – independent, venue-based, and staff in theatre companies alike – were forced to go through as Covid-19 seeped through the country. But the halt on Hold On Let Go felt particularly poignant to Annie because: “It's the first production we've made that’s not been seen in the north-east. It feels like a work that hasn’t had its full life yet.”

As more and more theatre performances have been filmed and screened online, inevitably Unfolding Theatre felt tempted to do the same. And yet, something about that format didn’t feel right. “The show is so much about hosting and being convivial, about Alex and Luca welcoming people into the room, giving them a drink, the smell of bread baking,” says Annie. Its “easy conversation space” would be lost if they took the “YouTube broadcast, just sit and watch it” path. 

It’s not that the show is especially participatory – “we’ve made shows that ask more of the audience”, says Annie, in which “people have to make paper darts, or fill out a bit of paper” – but it does thrive on people’s presence. In that sense, Hold On Let Go is a typical Unfolding Theatre show: “We’ve always said we're interested in big-hearted theatre that brings people together, or theatre that builds connections across social division. At the end of the day, it felt like a show that’s about being together, and it would only make sense to film it with an audience there. And that was the thing we couldn't do.” 

At the beginning of 2021, the company returned to Hold On Let Go, to think about what its future life might be. Had it missed its moment? “We had a sense that we needed to do some script work on it: the world's changed radically in the past year and a half, not just in terms of the pandemic experience, but also in terms of Black Lives Matter,” says Annie. What they found, to their surprise, was that: “the script feels more relevant now than it did in 2019”. At the centre of Hold On Let Go is a set of questions: “What do we hold as societies and as individuals in our memories, and what do we let go of? We are not holding everything: certain things have been purposefully held down – and some things get over-remembered.” The toppling of the Edward Colston statue in June 2020 was an acute reminder: “that we are holding on to a very patchy memory as a society. People knew that in 2019 – but it wasn't as vivid as it is now.” And then, at a more comic level, another prescience was revealed: “Alex makes sourdough in the show! Which is hilarious, because that's obviously had its lockdown moment.”

This sense of, if not actual clairvoyance, at least a kind of pulse-taking with Hold On Let Go, reminded Annie of conversations with one of the Unfolding Theatre board members, architect Tim Bailey. “He’s said a few times that artists are like prophets and messengers, which I find a strange thing, because it’s not language I would use. But I think we do see things that are coming, because we listen really well.” Over Unfolding Theatre’s pandemic year, “that listening has been even more acute and even more focused”, refining its sense of place and purpose in ways that will shift how the company works for years to come.

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

Press PAUSE to find out more about the ongoing journey of B-Sides.

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.