Arrive early and leave something behind

The title of this blog post is a nugget of wisdom. One of many tiny jewels that we were lucky enough to be given at a meeting which marked the beginning of a very exciting relationship. Last  Friday Theatre Rush met up with the wonderful Mark Wallace, of Beaford Arts, and David Lane, a fantastic writer and dramaturg. It was the first time that all of us had been in the room together since the first murmurings of a potential creative relationship began back in July. Some of us were meeting for the first time. So there was a sense of..well... risk. No one really knew what to expect, or whether this would work. (And we can't know the answer to the latter yet, although we've got a pretty good feeling about it. )

We needn't have worried, as it soon emerged that we had a lot of shared interests and 'ways' of working. We had sent a hefty zip file over to David at his request a few weeks before, with a little bit of everything we had done as a company. Scripts, photos, questions we had answered, footage. Anything and everything. And it felt so unspeakably wonderful to discover that David had spent a great deal of time searching through this folder and responding to it. It felt like being 'studied', in the best possible way. David was able to hold up a mirror to some of the workings and ambitions of Theatre Rush, bit as individuals and a company, and whilst getting to know him, we felt like we were getting to know our company a bit better too. Something that really stayed was the notion that we make work that doesn't always completely know itself until an audience arrives. David's dramaturgy helped us to articulate this 'thing' that lies right at the centre of what we do. We kind of knew it was there, but hadn't really looked at it head on.

Three hours later, after "flexible preferred goals", hopes and visions, mirrors and Lionel Ritchie interruptions, we left the comfortable darkness of The Bike Shed Theatre and emerged, blinking, into the appropriately dazzling sunshine of a Devon afternoon and felt POSITIVE. Boy does it feel good to have a clear path ahead of us. Granted one with many crossroads and pitfalls and unknowns, but a path nonetheless.  I was moved to involuntary noises of excitement on a number of occasions during the meeting, inspired by the utter joy of possibilities. Without support, all those options can be confusing, limiting and overwhelming. But with Mark's guidance and David's dramaturgy and infectious enthusiasm, the myriad creative opportunities that are spreading before us feel a weeny bit like Christmas.

We haven't ironed out all the creases yet, but we can say that we will be working with Mark and David on developing The Lost Tales of Devon towards a potential Rural Tour, and we literally can't WAIT to get started.

More imagination than you can shake a mint cake at

Well Mint Fest, I'm not sure anyone should be having that much fun whilst still being able to call it 'work'. What an amazing, inspiring and completely bonkers weekend! It was a little bit like someone had broken reality and we loved it! But more than anything we would like to say thank you to the good people of Kendal for writing this, the most bizarre but strangely comprehensible Tall Tale that we have ever had the pleasure of typing up. It begins with cabbage disease, takes in aardvarks and banana barons, and ends with the overthrowing of government by a large angry cloud man. Who could ask for more?

THE MINT FEST 2014 TALL TALE

Written one word at a time by Marvellous MintFesters

Cabbage disease is taking over our green, luscious plentiful landscape. Inebriation of every living turtle; enormous, moveable cheeky knees. She laughed chocolate and opened her large protruding wings comfortably, threateningly. Gosh! An aardvark (not an armadillo) green and lizard crawling along the bank, went kissing in vain. Instead, the aardvark swam anxiously towards the enormous scary crocodile. Frightened, he got eaten and his eye popped out. 

“Oh heck” said he, “Help!”. 

And he called his friend Richard, who worked in Greggs.

“Um, er, I need help NOW!!!”

“Tractor, or a pasty?”

But then, BANG! He went insane.

Luckily Mandy, his disciple, thwarted evil. Wow! Alisdair went to the temple of bananas. However he opened the banana, he picked it up and it was a telephone. Sweeties rained down from a purple pig- an awkward situation. How would we eat them all? 

“Quite easily” said Tom. “Yum, yum, yum”>

Then the baron of banana tower ate all the sweeties, then marshmallows. Concurrently, the crocopython saved the turtle called Kevin. Suddenly, out of the river came a humpback dolphin, who eats snail pasta. He burps… and sinks and shouts

“Help! I am stuck beneath an elephant” who sank magnificently underwater.

A quadrilateral snail-bird, swimming, fell down the waterfall and hit his shell, but he turned over and swam upstream. Bubbles spilled unexpectedly from the mouth.

“Oh dear. Next time we should make something better. HOT DOG!” he shouted, “Help me!”.

Suddenly an eruption engulfed the end of his head and burnt a hole in his toupee, which was on a pig called Dan who… was smelly and unbelievably fat, but very tasty. Hippercrocadollapig’s fun-house dog jumped high among the Space Unicorns, shooting marshmallows  at an army of men. Suddenly they squashed her helmet because plums ate grass. Unfortunately, sheep had brains, which exploded!

Quadrilateral snail bird jumped a cache, squashed a tomato sandwich flat. Bob, who doesn’t portray himself very well, hid in a duck that poops jelly beans supercalifragalisticexpialidociously. Fell-shoes, who gobbles caterpillars, collects snow-globes and poo, throws shoes gently at Ewan. Cloudman throws clouds, hailstones and raindrops at the government, because  he was drunk and angry.

THE END!!