I recently visited rural West Dorset twice in a week. An early evening visit to the beach enclave of Burton Bradstock prior to a Teddy Thompson gig at Bridport’s amazing Electric Palace was followed swiftly by a family jaunt to West Bay, waltzing along the harbour dodging fishing trawlers.
Reaching Out
While I was there, I got thinking about Dorset’s fast burgeoning theatre scene. Thomas Hardy country leads the way in the South West’s rural theatre environment. Artsreach, Dorset’s rural arts development agency, is a major catalyst behind this, coordinating a regular influx of diverse theatre while encouraging artists to make the county their home. As well as taking art out to the community, Artsreach and professional development agency Activate Performing Arts make Dorset a place where people want to move and make theatre. From Bridport to Dorchester, Weymouth to Sturminster Newton, and everywhere conceivable in between, there is plenty to see around here.
Making home
Stuff and Nonsense’s Marc Parrett and Niki McCretton, based at the newly reclaimed Lyric Theatre in Bridport, moved in from outside the county because the county wanted them. They have space and time and inspiration to work, the results of which are bearing fruit in expanding, fast growing, nationally touring children’s puppet theatre.
Shanty Theatre have a base in Devon but are given the keys to the Marine Theatre in Lyme Regis each summer because their audience demand it. Co-artistic directors Tim Bell and Harry Long have a fire in their bellies that gives a folksy ensemble of actor-musicians a gutsy relationship with the people of Lyme. Their plays are about people and places and about the way in which we do and don’t belong anywhere we want. Shanty’s previous production, the total sell-out success ‘A Rat’s Tale’, gave the company a chance to nail down their identity, evolving a distinctive process that gives actor, audience, usher, producer and theatre manager the feeling of complete ownership of the story being told. No matter how unlikely, no lies are told in their productions because the shared experience must be complete and open and honest.
‘A Rat’s Tale’ also saw Shanty’s first experience of the region’s rural touring scheme, a challenge that only tested their ethos. How would a play made in Lyme Regis, about the people of Lyme Regis, be received in Cerne Abbas? Or Woolacombe? Or Coalpit Heath? By making it about that place, and those people. A demanding task for actors having to remember which village they were in at that moment, but a fundamental for what the company stands for.
Shanty, like Stuff and Nonsense, has found that its audiences want more. In an environment where we are being forced to prepare for less, let’s hope Dorset remains willing and ready to give theatre the room to grow.
Nick White is a theatre maker and producer.