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Suba Das, Curve’s Associate Director of Community Engagement, tells us about his gurus.

Jeremy Thomas and the Newcastle Royal Grammar School

When we were 11, my twin brother and I got scholarships to the Newcastle Royal Grammar School (RGS). It’s only with the slight cynicism of now being very much a grown-up that I look back with a certain wonderment at how utterly fine and unremarkable it felt for me and my brother to be two of the few non-white council estate kids in such an establishment. That feeling of not being an outsider, of being fine as I was and am, can only be a testament to the commitment of that venerable institution’s teachers to inclusivity and excellence for all.

Leading the way in that was Head of Drama, the formidable Jeremy Thomas, whose ambition for the work that could be made with young people meant that the rich and regular programme of student shows was populated by complex and challenging work by Shakespeare, Stoppard, The Theatre Workshop and even Ionesco, and site-specific work way before Punchdrunk were making it cool.

Mr Thomas also believed that the best way to engage young people with theatre was to give them the opportunity to make their own work, going toe-to-toe with the School Board every year to ring-fence money for student-originated and directed productions. I look back on my early ‘bold’ theatre choices (specifically directing a production of The Mousetrap, and devising a piece in sixth form about infanticide…) and am stunned and grateful to have had the privilege from an early age of people fighting for the space for artists to grow, however haphazardly.

I can see the direct line of inspiration from the opportunities at school to my own work now at Leicester’s Curve theatre. In April, we launch our inaugural Inside Out Festival, Curve’s first major commitment to the showcasing of work by local artists, with over 100 East Midlands artists and companies forming the ten-day programme. Alongside this, we’ve opened up the building to different art forms, embracing the idea that excellent performance in the 21st Century doesn’t necessarily look like a “well-made play”. We now have an in-house break-dancing academy, a gospel choir that meets weekly, and our first Associate Companies, including New Art Club, with all local artists creating work that fuses elements from dance, interactive technology and storytelling to fashion: something that feels very 21st Century indeed.

Joan Littlewood and Theatre Royal Stratford East

I began my career as a Resident Director at Theatre Royal Stratford East, and even this many decades later the irrepressible, formidable energy of Ms Littlewood resonates throughout that building. What I see in Joan’s work is an unflinching commitment to the idea of democracy and accessibility, and a belief that this doesn’t compromise artistic integrity and ambition. To think that ‘Oh What A Lovely War’, a devised piece of pseudo-agitprop theatre fusing commedia dell arte, music hall and reportage, could make it into the West End and be a sell-out smash hit makes it abundantly clear that theatrical innovation and experimentation doesn’t need to be about pretension or exclusivity. My first assignment at Stratford East was on the blistering ‘Township Stories’, a devised piece from the State Theatre in South Africa, which fused a cinematic sense of time-shifting storytelling, with heartbreakingly poignant and horrifying movement sequences underscored by a string of 20th Century pop hits. Witnessing the captivated response of packed houses of young local kids as knitting needle abortion was conveyed using a washing line and ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’ by Carole King, will quite definitely stay with me my entire life.

The straight line between Joan’s work and something like ‘Township Stories’ is a commitment to the idea that our ‘ordinary people’ have sophistication in every part of their lives, and that within the popular culture of everyday life, there really is the source material for that thing we call ‘art’. That duality of being accessible but challenging; rooted in the present but somehow transcendent – I’m grateful to Stratford East for consistently being a space for that work.

Stratford East gave me my professional debut as a Director, and it was probably only in that building that I could create a site-specific production of ‘Medea’, hidden within the epic backstage spaces of the theatre, with a pretty dense literary adaptation of the text fused with storytelling by Peter Brook’s collaborator Inno Sorsy, and choreography by Kenrick Sandy of Olivier-Award-winning street dance company Boy Blue Entertainment.  The moment I knew I had a career was when on the final night of that show, three young black boys took to their feet during the final climactic moments of Kenrick’s choreography to shout “Go On Medea!”. If I achieve nothing else, I’ll have that moment ‘til the day I die.

Steve Unwin and Rachel Tackley

Without any doubt, English Touring Theatre (ETT) have been the greatest supporters I have had throughout my career and I am so honoured to call Steve Unwin, previous Artistic Director, and Rachel Tackley, the current Chief Executive, friends.  Under Steve and then Rachel, ETT has not only created some of the best productions of classical text in the world and proudly, fearlessly, taken them to parts of the country that often don’t receive high quality work; but they’ve also made a coherent and considered case for widening what is meant by ‘British theatre’. Steve Unwin was the first person to say really straightforwardly and uncomplicatedly to me: “classical theatre doesn’t belong to anybody… there are simply tools and skills, and anyone can pick them up.” A statement as simple as that led directly to the establishment of Custom/Practice in 2010, a company I set up with brilliant co-director Rae McKen to widen access to classical theatre for diverse artists.

Meanwhile under Rachel, ETT has welcomed work by Simon Stephens, Tanika Gupta, Mustapha Matura, Arinze Kene and Che Walker under the banner of the best of British theatre. That list underlines the thing I have been most inspired by in that company: an easy, uncomplicated diversity that doesn’t have anything to do with ticking boxes, but producing and presenting the best work out there, and having the passion and commitment to seek out that work in as many places as possible and to fight for it. I thank them both for that.

Suba Das is Associate Director of Community Engagement at Curve.

Curve’s Inside Out Festival, celebrating the work of the best of the East Midland’s emerging artists runs from 10 – 19 April. For more information visit www.curveonline.co.uk

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