The fourth angel

Imagine a small business. It runs with a core team of three. One of the team announces that she’s pregnant – cue choruses of congratulations. You scrape together the cash to advertise for maternity cover, and start to think about how her role could become part-time when she returns. So far, so everyday. Now imagine that the business is a performance company touring devised work at home and abroad. And that the mum-in-waiting is one of the two founding artistic directors, without whom no show has been made, or performed, before. Suddenly it’s a bit more complicated. Going from a company of footloose twenty-somethings who routinely put in silly hours for sillier money, to one having to fit rehearsals around the needs of four under-fives, has been a bit of a shock for Third Angel. The resulting changes in our practice have offered some unexpected opportunities as well.

The company’s first maternity leave threw up some fundamental questions about our identity. Third Angel’s work is the result of the alchemy between two particular creative minds. We couldn’t stick an advert in AP reading “Rachael Walton required (maternity cover – 6 months)”, but would any work made without her still be ‘Third Angel’? Then there were the practicalities. There are major advantages to being a tiny company; we can change our hours at the drop of a hat and adapt our long-term plans to include more work close to home. Theatres, however, can’t be that flexible. Shows (in the UK anyway) usually start during the period most parents are up to their elbows in milk, bubble bath and bedtime stories. Since becoming parents, all of us have struggled to make it to a theatre in time to watch a show, forget perform in one. We could no longer routinely romp past the supposed end of the working day. If a child needs collecting at 5pm, everything just… stops. It made us realise just how many extra hours we’d worked before, and taken it for granted.
Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t one magic answer. We considered taking a break from touring, but ruled it out – too crippling for the bank balance. Instead, we adapted the way we initiated and developed projects, to allow one artistic director to clearly lead, with part-time input from the other. Unexpectedly, this allowed the collaborations with other artists to flourish. Collaboration had always been there but perhaps hadn’t been given much space. For the first time, we recast a show for a major tour, to allow core members to be excused trotting it around Europe. We also took kids with us a couple of times, for longer international residencies. It worked with tiny ones – not sure we’d like to try it with rampaging pre-schoolers. Five years into company parenthood, a lot has changed. Because we have to stick to our working hours, we take less on. We prioritise ruthlessly, and our meetings are extremely snappy affairs: we know what’s worth debating and what to let go. We’ve also learnt to do telephone interviews while building a stickle-brick structure for a two-year-old, and to type reports over the head of a sleeping newborn, but we wouldn’t necessarily recommend you try those. We’re still working on a way to download the contents of the General Manager’s brain so that everyone else can find things when she’s on leave. Any ideas?