From the Wild West to the deep forest...in search of The Lost Tales of Gloucestershire

Sometimes I find myself in a situation where I have to pause and remind myself that what I'm doing is work. That this is genuinely my JOB. (Don't worry though, I balance it out by often going through the same thought process with my head in hands asking 'Why? WHY?'). The former happened a good few times during our research trip to Gloucestershire. Two days visiting three communities and a few beautiful spots in between.

This is not the Beast of Gloucestershire

I knew precious little about this county at this time last week. I'm sure that even now, buried beneath reams of paperwork and books and photos, we have only scratched the surface of this place. Chloe and I knew what I had managed to find on the internet and we set off armed with a few questions- 'Have you ever seen the Beast of Gloucesterhsire?', 'What makes this county unique?' and 'Who Killed the Bears?'. There was a 'no' in response to the first question (much to Chloe's disappointment), a massive variety of glorious reasons for the second, and an absolutely fascinating silence met the third. More on that later.

Our first stop was the leafy-laned village of Clifford's Mesne, where we were welcomed ever so warmly into a bright village hall across the way from the art installation phone box and the beautifully painted bus stop (the work of Veronica Gosling I'm told). We only had a couple of hours here, but there wasn't a moments silence. I sat and furiously scribbled while the gathering of local people told stories, shared cake and laughed (a lot). This was a very happy village, and we left with one particular gem of a story that we are hoping to slot into the beginning of the new show, along with lots of useful snippets to weave into the fabric of the narrative.

Onwards then to The Pludds, a marvellously named and charming village in the heart of the Forest of Dean. Here, alongside a proper dinner and apple crumble, we learnt how forest folk set themselves apart from the rest of Gloucestershire, cut off as they are by the Rivers Wye and Severn that form boundaries at either edge. One particular motto stuck in my mind which a local shared with us, which is 'If you want to find a fool in the forest, you had better bring him with you'. We met about ten lovely people in their lovely village hall, all self confessed straight-talking folk who pride themselves on having capable hands and long memories, who have never gone hungry even during the war because of the strong spirit of the foresters. It felt very different here- no less welcoming by any means, but we were struck by the change in landscape and way of life that can occur over such short distances.

It was here at The Pludds that we asked 'Who Killed the Bears?'. This is one of Gloucestershire's most enduring legends, and as I mentioned we knew a little. There had been a number of warnings that I'd found not to ask the question, as, according to a few websites, it remains a sore subject. Naively, I thought that couldn't possibly be true. Now I know a little better. It is a true testament to the power of story and rumour that this tale, now well over a hundred years old, can still stir up such feeling in the people of the villages surrounding Ruardean. We were fascinated by this, and although we know that this is a powerful tale, we are eager to find a way to tell it truthfully in the show. I feel genuinely nervous about this, which oddly seems to tell me that it's the right one to tell. As we say in The Lost Tales, "all stories are important, even the ones that are hardest to tell". Fingers crossed we find a way.....

We stayed the night in Painswick, which again felt a million miles from both of the other places we had visited. This seemed to us to be Gloucestershire at it's most manicured, all mellow golden stone and clipped hedges, very different to the deep wooded valleys of the forest. And then it was on to our final village visit, a few miles along the Golden Valley to France Lynch. I have never been anywhere quite like France Lynch (and Chalford/Chalford Hill as all three villages nestle close together). I have certainly never DRIVEN anywhere like France Lynch. It is made up of a breathtaking winding maze of walled lanes, which we later found out used to be donkey tracks. This made a lot of sense, and helped me to understand how much bigger my car is than a donkey. Reversing down through the village when we met a bin lorry genuinely nearly finished me off.

But we survived and I didn't hit anything and, again, we were met by a wonderful group of interested and interesting people from the village who had gathered a wonderful pile of books and leaflets for us. We gained such a good sense of the life of this lively village from them, so generous were they with their stories and anecdotes and once more, the conversation darted about the table so much that I'm sure I missed some gems! But we have certainly left with a story that we feel can be expanded and slotted into the show, and plenty of things unique to the village that I can't wait to craft into a daily report. After an explore and some lunch at The King's Arms we wound our way down 'Dark Lane' (never again) and as I pondered how steep a hill needs to be before a car would completely flip over, our trip came to a close.

Now begins the harder task, the sifting and editing. How do you choose one story, so generously told over another? What makes one village quirk more interesting than the next? How do you tell the stories that are never told in a way that returns the ownership to the village? If I ever find the answers, I shall be sure to let you know.

Ooop north in Stoke on Trent

STOKE SOUTH CARNIVAL, you were amazing. Such a beautiful day, surrounded by beautiful people. And such imaginations too...

Here is your very own 'Story for Stoke', written one beautiful word at a time by festival goers. It's got the best ending I think we've ever had....


Once upon a time a dog jumped over the wall and sniffed out a bone. Licking the lolly, he saw a bacon and cheese oatcake and screamed loudly, "FOOD!". Then Rhys ate it, "YUM!"

Sadly the dog cried, then pooped in the air and it landed on Rhys's head! Lydia said, "I want shampoo and jammy dodgers, I want to jump so high!". "What happened?" Rhys cried, "Heck, what do I do? I don't know, maybe I'll go to the park/pub".

Elsewhere, an atom bomb boomed, crackled within the ship called 'Puffin' and the captain said, "Aye up, duck, we're broken!" and they drowned. The suddenly, BANG! Another stuck ship appeared over the gloomy sea. It couldn't move because they were deeply in snow. They got some snow shoes, in pink. "We''l escape! To the Island, the lighthouse is just there". Then they fell in the snow... DUN DUN DUUUUUUNNNN!

Somebody dug a big hole and jumped in and saved the Gruffalo. The the monster ate the robot. 

Happiness descends over the Mummy in Egypt. "Hello", said Kenzi, said Joseph, "No idea, Dad!"

Eventually, sense prevailed and someone brewed tea.

THE END

Beware Dramaturg Armed with Sharpies

Autumn, it seems, is upon us. There's a nip in the air and the leaves are crisping up nicely. And to celebrate this change in the seasons, we are changing things up on this 'ere blog with a GUEST POST! Yes! I know, we're good to you....

Beware Dramaturg Armed with Sharpies

David Lane 2^nd October 2014

Starting any new relationship with another creative being can be tricky. 

I married my wife after meeting her on an internet dating site, and despite sharing plenty of communication before we first met – emails, photos, music, hand-written ramblings – that first time we faced each other over a (pub) table was at once exciting, nerve-wracking, and full of the possibility of great success or stalling failure.

Beginning a dramaturgical relationship with a new playwright or company carries some of these familiar hallmarks – you sense it’ll kind of work, the noises made by both parties are all good, you’ve found out what you can about one another, you’re trusting in a shared commitment to some common goals, but when you meet in the flesh… how… exactly… does it all happen? Where are we going? Do we know? Does that matter? What’s the process meant to be? Should it be that – or something else?

Enter Sharpies (and exit metaphor: I didn’t use Sharpies to plan my relationship or my marriage, though there was a drunken diagram of potential in-laws on the back of a beermat).

As both dramaturg and playwright I have always tried to write everything down in the early stages – part of my own process of recording and later sifting out the important bits of conversations – but increasingly the Sharpie has become the tool with which I’ll be trying to shape and map out a process for my own or somebody else’s creativity. 

The Sharpie is awesome. It lists, it reflects, it organises, it colour codes (if you have more than one) and with a big flipchart you can see thoughts and questions all in one place and track how it has journeyed, developed and how it now all inter-relates. Plus it has a nice thick line that feels all definite and productive. 

Okay, so it’s not the Sharpie doing that – the right tools often need to be available to you to make a job feel easier. The benefit, I hope, for the company in question is that I can act as a filter and focusing tool for their creativity: that when the talking is done, there is a map left behind that points the way forward, shaping and guiding the next steps. 

This collaboration with Theatre Rush and Beaford Arts is completely new to all three parties. We are crashing together three known processes – devising, producing rurally and dramaturgy – to make one that is unknown to us. We bring different things to the table, but by our second session have shown ourselves open to challenging one another, and all want our skills to work better together (whilst sounding less like a political campaign strapline).

What’s been refreshing with Theatre Rush and Beaford Arts is their willingness to be hands-off about what they’re bringing with them: respectively an existing show and process, and an idea of what a rural residency within communities might look like for a company. They offer them up for comment and scrutiny. Their benevolence has made my job much easier. The Sharpies have been whirring. 

The next practical stage now approaches – two days of dramaturgy looking at the core stories that create The Lost Tales of Devon – and if the spirit of collaboration continues in this vein (open to challenge, fluid process, reflective and driven in equal measure) we’re in for a rich and rewarding time. The right tools are already available in the room: we just have to find the ones we need most.  

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!!

Thunderbolts and Lightning, very very.....wet!

Well what a weekend! It started with the biggest thunderstorm any of us had ever seen (let alone camped through), and we were all very thankful that the heaviest downpour held off until our last tent peg was in. And then a night of thunderclaps and heavily leaking tents (and Theatre Rushers crawling from tent to tent in the dark trying to find a dry place to sleep!). And with just a few hours kip under our berets, we scrabbled the barrow together between rainy onslaughts, donned very damp costumes and wondered how we would ever squeeze some creativity out of sleepy, soggy festival goers.....

Oh, but how wrong we were. Larmer Tree, you blew our SOCKS off with your weird and wonderful creations! And so, without further ado, here it is- what you've all been waiting for. It's our ONE WORD STOOOOORRRRRYYYY! (No suprises really that thunder is a running theme).

THE LARMER TREE 2014 ONE WORD STORY

Once Upon Bob, exploded pineapples, BOOM! Jellyfish suddenly landed on  planet, “Llama Exotic”. Satisfactory ate delicious tropical fruit (Papaya). However, Swagalicious penguins enjoy eating fish and seals but unbelievably, Henry flushed! Flabergasted, pandiculated, he remonstrated with Father Christmas who was drunk. Bangers! Look! Martians!

Suddenly pyjamas rained inside an elephant’s trunk. What? Where? Here? Hawaii! So… we drummed vigorously on the tummy of the giant! With a thunderous roar the giant’s hunger grows. Unfortunately famine erupted unexpectedly. The polar bear farted very nanishly and then died.

Suddenly, Billy began turning away from responsibility and jumped all fences. But then catastrophe! The polar spaceship collided with pandas until a light erupted. Fortunately, outlandish smells, Rhubarb wine with ice. The stinky toilets need cleaning. 

My dog regularly regurgitates asbestos which hurts. But he is an ogre. He was rehabilitated. incredibly, cabbage gets eaten by the monster called Arnold. Suddenly lightning struck, instantly shocking a teapot, turning it into a cat.

Turnips ran around stones, fabulously undulating whilst singing, live, discombobulated monkeys bounced into trees. Tarzan banged his head, then put frozen beans into his underpants. His mother worried about the boy, because he was being naughty. 

Then the  bump smacked into Papua New Guinea, then the monster exploded and fell onto a tight rope, when suddenly, without thinking, a mad faith burped gently. Suddenly, mermaids swarmed around bees under an airbed. Conveniently there was an elephant with an enormous bottom who screamed with joy.

“Oh no!” shouted Bob(!) Marley, who teleported to Rome, where his big porcupine ate him. The Roman’s hobby blew button rings and then melted into a confusing blob of bras. Yellow badgers went black and also bought penguins. Together, penguins poo in harmony. Confusingly, alarmingly, but instantly, when Communism strikes, pugs cheer!

Woefully, with hedge and hog, “Budiga-Turkey-Cake” went to the supermarket. The Marleen cradled an alpaca and became a zombie. Instantaneously the Spanish Armada sank- then or etc…..

Bob thought supercalafragalisticexpialadociously of Bruno. Sadistic clouds and adfenesrating advertisers attacked a chicken. Catastrophically immense! Then a gargantuan tadpole grew a pink horn and thrusted ever more. Eventually, the tadpole leapt into a frog and kissed the Princess Randombottom lightly upon her painted toe.

THE END!

If you'd like to find out more about what we do, please check out our website- www.theatrerush.com

Ummmmm.....

Our build has begun, and so have our attempts at learning a brand new language.

What's a flange?
Why does my brake cable need a nipple?
Where oh where does one find Birch flexi-ply?

Over the past week we have ordered steel, and stood awkwardly in a vast warehouse populated by a few, hard to find and rather taciturn men whilst it was cut to size. We have carefully and stiltedly read out our requirements to very helpful timber yards in Wales and Bristol like we are ordering from a menu in a foreign country. We have stood around, thinking, comparing, measuring and scratching our chins with our welder, Nathan, and have discussed the pros and cons of widths, wheels and wingnuts with our ever patient maker, Richard. On Tuesday we even stopped off between the bike shop and the metal yard to jump start a car. Hey, that's just how we roll.


It's a funny feeling, suddenly being without the right language. It takes all our courage to make each phone call or to step into each echoing workshop. We don't know the right words, the right questions to ask. And we are secretly elated when someone else offers to make the phone call instead of us.

But slowly, very slowly, we are finding our feet. We now say 'mil' instead of millimetres, and we don't even bother measuring things in inches. Pah, that's a mugs game. Having watched the frame grow out of the lengths of metal and bits of bike and having discussed flexi-ply 'til the cows come home, we are starting to understand a little of what we're talking about.  Which is a very good thing, because soon we will have a wonderful working barrow which comes apart into three pieces and needs to be reassembled lovingly and efficiently for each and every gig. And we will be ready, with an allan key (is that how you spell it?!) in one hand and an 8mm spanner in the other.

BRING IT ON!