Once Upon a Time in Barnstaple

Arts Council England have helped us with funding to research and script a community play for Barnstaple.

We had been planning the play for some time. We submitted an application to ACE to support the first stages of the project early in 2020. That application was one of many lost in the reallocation of ACE’s resources to deal with the funding crisis precipitated by Covid-19. But ACE agreed an adjustment to a different, successful application that allowed us to forge ahead with Phase 1 of the project to create a play for Barnstaple.

The ambition for the play is to take stock of where we are now through the prism of our history.

Barnstaple has proved both resilient and resourceful faced with challenges in the past.

The Great Flood of 1607 was a calamitous reminder of the destructive power of nature at a moment when Barnstaple’s confidence was riding high because of its importance as an international port.

Other incidents of local and national moment that suggested possible narratives included the fall-out from the terror plot of 1605 and the effect of outbreaks of plague on the region – one effect being that Shakespeare’s company twice performed in Barnstaple during this period.

Though we had these clear points of departure, we were open to other possibilities thrown up by the research process. It’s as much Barnstaple now that we’re interested in as Barnstaple then, using the historical context as a distancing device so that we don’t get bogged down in the minutiae of current personalities and specific issues. We want to look at the broader sweep of how decisions are made, what agency people feel they have to shape their futures, what investment people make in their communities. We are looking to animate the play with characters found in the historical records but we will also draw on the accounts of people in Barnstaple now to create the personal dramas that drive the narrative.

Throughout 2020 we were amassing material. From January 2021 we began developing the script. In Autumn 2021 we had a reading of draft 1, which showed us what was working and what needed further thought.

Once covid restrictions were lifted we put most of our energies into re-establishing a viable working model for the company. We toured Hefted across the country, invested a lot of time and energy in Theatre Workhouse and started work on what became Last Dance Saloon. But this project is still very much in our minds, the narrative potential shifting as the world changes.

"You didn't tell me what to think, you opened a door to a place where I could think." This was an audience comment on another of our current projects, Hefted by David Lane. The remark encapsulates what we are aiming to achieve with the play for Barnstaple.