Making New Old Friends

Meeting Feargus Woods Dunlop, Artistic Director of Bath based theatre production company New Old Friends, is an energising experience that leaves you feeling that you really have just made a new old friend.

Fearg’s huge welcoming smile and easy, sunshiny attitude quickly set the tone for the interview.  The passion that he and Company Manager Heather Westwell have for making entertaining theatre that can rival a night out at the cinema or the pub is inevitably infectious and I find myself wishing I’d been around to see previous shows that the duo have been involved in as producers and performers. 

Ensuring I don’t miss the next chance to see them at work I surreptitiously grab the phone to quickly programme in 31^st January to see the preview of Silly Songs of Shakespeare at the Rondo Theatre, Bath, before it takes off on it’s 23 date national tour.

New Old Friends have been around for about 5 years and was originally the theatrical love child of Fearg and friend/co-founder Josh Golga.  Though Josh has since left for pastures filmic and otherwhere for the time being, New Old Friends continue to bound forward, the biggest and most significant leap of recent times being Heather joining as Company Manager.  I settle down, notebook and chewed pen in hand to find out more from Mr Fearg…

So tell me what makes you and Heather a dream team?

We had a meeting recently where our double act of energetically stupid man and slightly disapproving sensible lady was praised as a good bit of branding. But to be honest it’s not that far from the truth. I’ve got a tendency to be a bit “Oh it’ll be alright.” Whereas Heather is fantastic at making sure that ‘alright’ isn’t enough. We want our shows to be great.

And how long have you two been actoring for?

I’m tempted to say forever - Heather used to put on shows for her neighbours with her sister aged about 5! But it’s been an exclusively performance-based career for about 5 years, which we’re hugely grateful for.

Do you and Heather write all the material?

Yes, we write the vast majority of our work at home over a brew/stew. Although occasionally I take the laptop and find a nice spot somewhere to sit and pretend to write whilst secretly hoping someone asks me what I’m doing so I can tell them I’m a playwright! But with Silly Songs, our cast are fabulous and have contributed a few songs themselves which has been an unexpected but very welcome bonus.

Okay, what is the Silly Songs of Shakespeare show and tour and how did that come about?

Theatre Royal Bath’s Shakespeare Unplugged commissioned us to create a show that took a sideways looks at Shakespeare. We wrote a bunch of daft songs, performed them in a silly way, and were picked up by producer/tour-booker extraordinaire Mark Makin of makin projects, and the rest is history.   Since Shakespeare Unplugged we’ve made the show 50% bigger (and obviously 50% funnier!).  I love Shakespeare but I think the weight of the significance of the bard can make it feel as though it’s just for geeks.  Our show is all about our audience being serenaded by the beautiful beehived Sonnettes with our ‘synopsongs’ and having a thoroughly and satisfyingly silly time.

It’s a tough economic landscape at the moment and creative industries tend to get hit first/hardest when belt tightening happens – what’s your survival strategy?

Our strategy can only really be to keep producing work that is worth people spending their money on. It bothers us greatly when we go to see shows charging premium prices that aren’t premium quality because that hurts theatre as a whole. Right now venues are even more scared of unknown quantities so we’re very proud, honoured and grateful to get this tour now.

Where do you reckon the company will be in another 5 years time?

If we continue to move along the path we’re on, hopefully in five years we’ll be settled into a regular routine of writing, building and touring one or two shows a year. Which would be awesome.

What’s next up for New Old Friends in the way of exciting projects?

Well one of the fruits of Heather’s labours has been securing the rights to Anthony Horowitz’s The Falcon’s Malteser. It is a brilliantly funny book that spoofs the film-noir Raymond Chandler private detective genre and we’re so excited to get to work on it. Anthony Horowitz is a league or two above us (he’s currently scripting Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s new movie…) so it was thrilling to meet him and talk about our ideas for staging his book. He’s been great and he’s really behind the project. We’re currently looking to get co-producers on board, so watch this space.

SILLY SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE TOURS NATIONALLY FROM 7^th Feb.

A SPECIAL SOUTH WEST PREVIEW IS ON AT BATH’S RONDO THEATRE
Thursday 31^st Jan, 8pm.
Tickets £12/£10 from 01225 463362 or www.bathboxoffice.co.uk/rondo

The Shaughraun Review - April 2012

To have taken the 19^th century melodramatic romantic comedy The Shaughraun by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault from a traditional, usually heavily staged setting and perform it outdoors in Crediton Town Square was a brave feat, requiring vision and verve from Peter Hamilton and Crediton Arts Centre last summer.  The gamble of offering Crediton a piece of non-Shakespearean open-air theatre paid off and the show was so well received the suggestion of an indoor revival this spring was warmly welcomed both by the home crowd and further afield.

Coming into the intimate snug-in-pub welcome of a packed Crediton Arts Centre on Saturday 31^st March the audience was greeted by live Irish folk music, lifting and transporting the spirits to another place, Suil-a-Beg, County Sligo on the West of Coast of Ireland, and another time, 1858, when the ownership and autonomy of Ireland was being fought over.

Despite the heady, heavy political backdrop the piece is comedic and the humour was well played out. Tom Blaen performed a chortle-inducing foppish English officer Captain Mollineaux, in love with the witty Irish gentlewoman Claire Ffolliott (Katherine Marsland) but duty bound to follow his orders to capture her brother, escaped convict Robert Ffolliott (Stu Wight), affianced to her friend Arte O’Neal (Petrina Truman). Truman carries the refinement and status of Arte well and remains frostily aloft to the lascivious advances of Cory Kinchela (Pat Laver) to make her his wife and possession having crippled her financially by the poor management of her lands and estates.  Fortunately for Arte and Robert, the loyal and inventive poacher-cum-vagabond ‘shaughran’ Conn O’Kelly (Tim Hole) is determined to foil the double-crossing of Corry and sidekick Harvey Duff (Eddie Holden) to help his friend Robert.

Hole’s portrayal of Conn was the driving force of the performance, his mesmerizingly energetic story telling lighting up the stage, infectiously invigorating his fellow cast members with the optimism to defeat Kinchela and Duff whatever the cost…

Hole was well supported by his love Moya Dolan (Victoria Crossly), gentle and yet full of joyful mischief, the peaceable Father Dolan (Geoff Fox) and emotional Mrs O’Kelly (Hilary Hamilton).  The Chorus did an entertaining job of keeping the audience abreast of where they were as the adventure capered around the landscape of Suil-a-Beg.

The show toured three other venues (Beer, Moretonhampstead and Newton Abbot) before coming home to Crediton Arts Centre.

Wasted by Kate Tempest

As the lights came up the woman next to me hurriedly wiped away her tears.  Her boyfriend hadn’t looked thrilled about being here when they first arrived; she had suggested he wait in the bar during the show but he refused.  He wanted to do this with her, for her.  He was confused by her tears, squeezed her hand and led her as quickly as he could out of the auditorium, away from the cause of her distress.

He reminded me of Ted.  I wondered if she felt like Charlotte.

An initial burst of projected images wordlessly introduced the three characters to us – Charlotte the classroom teacher aching to travel; Ted the office worker, tied, tired and tangled by the endless repetition of colourless days; Danny the arty drop out mate, with low level addictions to a life lived high as opposed to a powder-and-pill-free world that under delivers against what he believes he could be. 

The characters themselves then came out, sheepishly, blinking into the bright lights on the stage, a more crumpled, less refined version of the selves we had seen moments before on the big screen; smaller, less controlled.  They said nothing for a while.  Looked at one another, at us, went to speak, lost their nerve.  Then exploded into rhythmic dialogue, directly, with the audience. 

The piece continued energetically for an hour, a mix of monologues delivered to their friend Tony, and scenes from the 24-hour period as they commemorated the 10th anniversary of his death at 15 by getting wasted, just like they used to.

The audience thus becomes Tony, who in turn becomes an imaginary ‘other’, a confessor and totem for a period in time when the concept of tribe, of belonging, of meaning, was unquestioned and self-confidence inevitable.  Each character takes this moment to measure up their disappointment in the life lived and to contemplate how they might change, to get back on track to their ‘true selves’.

Finding definition and meaning in existence is a fundamental question that we all grapple with, ignore, medicate against and quest to achieve at different moments in our lives.  We have grown up surrounded by the dialogue of choice – political and commercial propaganda tells us anything, everything is possible.  Wasted touches upon the consequences and challenges of such an environment as its’ inhabitants come of age and asks how, given this excess of choice, we intend to live.

Moby Dick - The Maiden Voyage

Well.  What a very good Good Friday it is today.

And that was it.  Our first week out there, sharing our adventure aboard the Pequod with the great and the good public.  It has been an exhausting week. Multiple 16 hour days to transform the Bierkeller Theatre from nightclub into 19^th century whaling ship (Sunday & a chunk of Monday), to rehearse all the technical aspects of the show (Monday and a chunk of Tuesday), to undertake the first full run of the show and dress rehearsal (Tuesday), to open our doors to welcome aboard our first audience (Tuesday) and then the press (Wednesday).  We rounded off our last show of the first week (Thursday) with a few fizzy lemonades & some homebaked whale[1] cake (by director Anna Girvan, is there no end to her list of talents?) to celebrate the birthday of our rather marvellous ASM (Pepz Cannell) and today we performed a mini get out to enable the Bierkeller to fulfil its other important function of being Bristol’s darkest and heaviest nightclub on a Friday and Saturday night.  Busy?  Yeah, you could say that.

BUT, what an awesome week!  The hard work of the weeks of rehearsal, prop and costume sourcing & making, in addition to the very physical slog of get ins and outs have really paid off.  The production has received great reviews (links below) and has been well appreciated by the audiences who have been fortunate enough to partake in the voyage thus far.  We’ve received nods of approval from our producer/writers and, well, yes, I’ll admit it, we’ve really rather loved getting the old girl launched and isn’t that really the magic fairy dust of theatre?  That a bunch of crazies get together and enthuse about making something happen and then work their proverbials off until, there you go, a show, an invitation to another world for a couple of hours is created.  Yes. It’s all a bit emotional.  There really hasn’t been enough sleep this week.  You’ll get more sense out of me next week. Possibly.

Well, we’re all off now, for some well earned shore leave.  We should probably save the celebratory babysham-and-brandy and fat-cigars-all-round levels of excess to the end of our run (which is an unthinkable amount of time away yet, thankfully) but a wee measure of grog is surely to be enjoyed by all before we board and relaunch the show again on Sunday evening.  

All that’s left to do is wish you all a very happy Easter/long weekend from DarkStuff Production and the Dickatrons…

http://www.guide2bristol.com/news/2036/Bristol-Bierkeller-Theatre-review--Moby-Dick-by-Darkstuff-Productions

http://www.thepublicreviews.com/moby-dick-the-bierkeller-theatre-bristol/

http://www.thisisexeter.co.uk/Dive-appreciate-depth-watery-threat/story-15735516-detail/story.html

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[1] NB No actual whales were harmed during the baking of this cake.