At New Perspectives, we pride ourselves on bringing high-quality theatre to rural and underrepresented audiences which, of course, also means that sometimes we play around with form, theatrical techniques and making productions for specific audiences. Here is a selection of some of the productions that showcase this from the last 50 years…

 

The Ghost Downstairs by Leon Garfield, adapted for the stage by Phelim McDermott & Lee Simpson (2004)

 

To conjure up Leon Garfield’s The Ghost Downstairs, Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson blended together puppetry, multi-media, music and choreography when adapting the story for the stage.

 

In our archive, we found a letter from an audience member where three generations of one family came along to one performance: "I only wish you could have heard the discussion in the car going home; questions and answers thrown backwards and forwards through the generations [...] The whole production was so imaginative and ingenious and transformed the village hall [...] Many thanks to you all for bringing some artistic life to our corner of the land".

 

Love From Cleethorpes (2020)

 

As the COVID-19 pandemic caused the live theatre industry to halt, we found ways to connect with audiences and share new stories with them from a distance, including creating WhatsApp and telephone dramas and creating our first ever postcard drama, Love From Cleethorpes.

 

The postcard drama, which reached over 2,200 people in 26 countries worldwide, told “a gentle and touching new story [that] unfolds in six deliveries, spanning two continents and three decades” (Kate Wyver, The Guardian).

 

Lyn Gardner said in The Stage that Love From Cleethorpes was “a rather interesting development in theatre’s current quest to find new platforms, methods of distribution and ways of engaging with audiences”.

 

 

Tripping the Light Fantastic by Jane Buckler (1999)

 

Tripping the Light Fantastic was a co-production with the Oxfordshire Touring Theatre Company which incorporated dance and music as key elements of the story’s narrative. In a letter accompanying the first draft of the script for Tripping the Light Fantastic, Jane Buckler wrote: "At the severe risk of sounding pretentious, I would like the show to flow rather like a piece of music. This means that sound and dance would inform it, not simply by marking events and emotions along the way, but by giving the whole thing an atmospheric frame”.

 

Jenny Roberts from OTTC said: “People who live in small communities cut off from the towns will really be able to relate to this play - particularly the young people [...] It also looks at the problem of the young leaving the village and heading for the bright lights".

 

 

 

 

Josiah Martin’s Travelling Theatre Show (1980)

 

Josiah Martin’s Travelling Theatre Show was a production that was tailor-made to tour old people’s homes and clubs; it was subtitled “Old-Fashioned Entertainment”.

 

Though the production toured in 1980, in the archives we found an article from the Peterborough Advertiser which reported that the production had been under threat due to a lack of funding: “The Eastern Arts Association was asked to help with a subsidy of £40, however The Perspectives claim that the Eastern Arts Association say there will be no money for the show because old people are “a limited audience””.

 

The Boss of It All by Lars Von Tier, adapted for the stage by Jack McNamara (2013/14)

Debuting at Edinburgh Fringe in 2013, The Boss of It All was the UK’s first staging of a film by Lars Von Trier. Adapted by Jack McNamara, the play told the story of Kristoffer, an out of work actor who has been hired as the boss of a failing company and, as you can imagine, chaos and comedy ensue.

 

The Boss of It All won the hearts of audiences and reviewers with Time Out magazine calling it an “impressively slick adaptation”. So much so that, during the COVID-19 lockdown, the production was streamed by Soho Theatre and a work-from-home version with Josie Lawrence was released.