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In a special feature marking the recent Pride of Place Festival, Ivan Cutting looks back on 25 years of rural touring and reflects on some of the challenges facing the sector.

My first memory of seeing theatre in a rural setting was an Ipswich Arts Theatre production of Waiting for Godot, which was taken round Suffolk village halls in the mid-1970s. Being a callow youth on the fringes of the theatre, I eagerly helped the stage management carry a lighting stand or two, while the actors made for the pub. It was followed a year later, I think, by Miss Julie. The director had clearly looked down his list of small-cast classic plays and decided to get out of the building for a short spell. It was novel and well done, if clearly missionary in intent.

Many other reps offered similar fare, usually under the banner of theatre-go-round or some such name. The classics soon ran out and adaptations of Sherlock Holmes and Hardy took over until they realised they were working on the wrong contract economically. They then discovered that they needed the small-cast productions for the mainhouse and, anyway, there were new kids on the block.

The upsurge of small-scale touring in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Arts Councils R&D officers went round waving chequebooks and dispensing Mercedes Benz vans, set a whole bandwagon rolling: Incubus, Joint Stock, Foco Novo, Cheek by Jowl all criss-crossed the country, visiting the burgeoning arts centres and small studio theatres that sought original and alternative theatre. This wave tended to be writer- and van-led, most notably by David Hare and Howard Brenton who actually wrote the plays in the van. An actor once told me, In those days we all did rural touring. Well, yes and no.

Audience focus

In fact, looking back, one is struck by how much of this work is only incidental to rural areas. Whether the forces driving this work were educational, political, aesthetic or classical, it was only occasionally that rural audiences themselves were addressed. And we were all too busy coping with the business plans, spreadsheets and sponsorship campaigns of the late 1980s.

However, a few companies, like Medium Fair down in Exeter, Northumberland up in the north-east, Perspectives in East Anglia or Pentabus over in the West Midlands, had done something different and focused on the local rural constituency. Each had a slightly different educational, theatrical, political or community spin, but there was a common focus. Many of these companies also provided Theatre in Education work, partly because education was a strong element of the ethos, but also to help pay the bills and attract the grants.

The proselytising mix made for some strange hybrids. And the style tended to be broad-brush, with lots of music, a kind of reaching out to say, Dont worry were only going to be serious in an entertaining way. John McGraths iconic The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil, which 7:84 toured into the Highlands and Islands, was one such example. When I helped start Eastern Angles in the early 80s, this and the documentary genre of Peter Cheesemans work at Stoke were the examples we drew on.
However, after a number of years, companies realised that the model on which they had been set up needed re-tuning, that the simple pared-down approach, which the RSC nicked for Nicholas Nickleby and the commercial theatre for The Woman In Black, was leading to a burn-out scenario. I overhead someone in an arts centre foyer describe Eastern Angles work once as Oh, they have no props and wear lots of hats. Our next show had a single set with working kitchen sink.

In the mid-1980s, the Arts Council launched their Glory of the Garden manifesto, the name of which suggests the rural should have blossomed. What we actually saw was a diminution of work finding its way out of the cities. The Garden they had in mind was clearly very much an urban garden as the Arts Council encouraged the big buildings to become mega-supermarkets.

And so most of the medium-sized touring companies disappeared in a puff of smoke, or became major stars like Cheek By Jowl or Complicité. Instead of a broad continuum of work, the smaller rural touring companies provided a rump end, which was in danger of being quietly forgotten. Also the rise of the touring schemes introduced a Big Bang effect, increasing the market but threatening the companies direct relationship with audiences.

The result in both cases has been positive in forcing us to raise our game. The major reps had already banded together to argue their corner, so in 1997 a dozen rural touring companies met in Nottingham to put our case. The result was the Pride of Place consortium, some Arts Council funding for professional development and a festival every two years. Nearly ten years on, and into our fourth festival, UpStix held in Ipswich and Woodbridge last month we face a number of challenges. While the sector started off pleased that the work could be done at all, now it has the challenge of proving that it can be done well and be advanced.

Rural barriers

The obstacles facing this area of work are legion: economic, technical, cultural and logistic. Ticket prices have not kept up with inflation and many of us tour areas of major rural deprivation; the era of moving lights, laser effects and video projection has widened the gulf between us and the mega musical; the gatekeeper role of the rural promoter can inhibit the programme we can tour; and ultimately we can only deliver what the actors can carry. Twenty-five years on, those lighting stands, loudspeakers and cables still weigh the same, or have got heavier. In the meantime the Daleks have learnt to cope with stairs; if only our get-ins and outs could be similarly transformed.
However, it is the cultural changes that concern us most. And this years festival flagged up a number of these in The Cobbett Sessions, named after the nineteenth-century polemicist who railed against the effect of London in his famous diatribe Rural Rides. So we asked if there is a passive apartheid in the countryside; if rural is a state of mind not a postcode; whether multiculturalism depends on some people being monoculturalists; how to balance the popular against the serious; and if buildings are just so yesterday.

Without doubt the most interesting and, I believe, most exciting, challenge every company faces in the next few years is the encouragement of more Black and minority ethnic artists to work in this field and the selling to audiences of this work. I think it is exciting, not just because of the correctness of the activity, but because it forces us all to rethink how we define our identity, an argument that is rapidly becoming a national debate. But it is a debate that properly belongs at community level rather than batted back and forth over Question Time.

While I always enjoyed the RSCs regional tour, it annoyed me when they claimed they were playing to audiences who had never seen theatre before. So we have to be careful about claiming more than we can deliver. The current obsession with new audiences is a case in point. Surely tempting an existing audience member into seeing something they didnt even know they wanted to see is just as important?

The strengths of the sector remain quite simple: the intimacy is still something many people yearn for, as is the feeling of watching as a community. This work, produced without the aid of big budgets and cutting-edge technology, often has a magic that people treasure. How many of us have seen a simple theatrical trick or the skill of actors produce comments and compliments like one we once received: Your helicopter was better than Miss Saigons.

Ivan Cutting is Artistic Director of Eastern Angles Theatre Company.
t: 01473 218202;
w: http://www.easternangles.co.uk