Co-Artistic Director Kate Stokes gives her two cents on the processes behind Riddlestick Theate’s two shows so far.

The Dead of Night in the Middle of Nowhere

I co-wrote this play with the co-founder of Riddlestick Theatre, Tom Manson. We begun writing it in 2014 during the summer holidays after our 2nd year of University. During that year we had taken a Film and Television Comedy unit, studied Early Modern plays in an Interpreting Plays unit, and Medieval morality plays in our Theatre Histories and Practices unit. In retrospect, this play was conceived as a result of influences from those studies. We loved studying The League of Gentlemen in Film & TV Comedy and wanted to take influence from their format of having one specific place where lots of different stories/sketches happen, and we had loved studying Jacobean plays, particularly ones with plenty of sensational acts of violence such as John Ford’s ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore, and those which incorporated folk-lore and witchcraft such as The Witch of Edmonton by Rowley, Dekker and Ford. Along with these influences, Tom and I are both fans of fairy-tales and folk-tales, particularly darker adaptations like those of Angela Carter, and huge fans of musical theatre, and of playing with language. And we’d watched a lot of Game of Thrones that year. Somehow all of these elements combined to create The Dead of Night in Middle of Nowhere. Our initial concept was quite simple – telling the origin tales of commonly used idioms, we thought this would allow for inventiveness and our desired episodic format.

Our initial ideas and planning process also heavily involved our friend and company member, Ash Scott. Together came up with the above concept, whittled down a huge list of idioms to ones we thought had potential, categorised them into thematic groups (such as idioms involving limbs – twisted my arm, pulling your leg, lend me a hand), and worked out an overarching narrative and all the little sub-plots and characters. We really created quite the epic muddle jig-saw for ourselves to sort out. Once we had a general idea, Tom and I would take the rough plans and individually write scenes, show each other, edit together. We also did this with the songs! I’m not very musically minded so Tom (who is very musically minded) would take the lead with songs, but I can bash out rhyming lines pretty well so I contributed a lot of lyrics in the end and got quite the taste for writing a ditty.

We worked a lot on writing this show over that summer, it was a very lovely process actually because we were under absolutely no pressure to deliver anything. It was just a bit of fun, really, something to have a go at in between second and third year. Then when we went back to uni, we popped it firmly on the shelf to get nice and dusty and forgotten about.

We returned to the play in early 2016, with a view to performing it that summer. Having had a whole year and a half, and having graduated and feeling like we were now SO much cleverer than our 2014 selves, we were a bit apprehensive about looking back at what we’d come up with, but actually we were presently surprised – it was good stuff! Although it was a bit of mess in terms of the narrative and sub-plots, so many things going on! So we set about honing what we had, stream-lining the primary narrative and making sure all the sub-plots linked to it enough. We focused on strengthening each main character’s arc. We cut stuff, we added stuff, we added more songs! It was actually so good to come back to it with the objective view that you gain after a year and a half. Tom had also been working on music ideas with Sophie Jackson since our first year of university which they then incorporated into this show, as well as composing more songs over this period.

After an intense two-week rehearsal period in our bedroom rehearsal space, we performed at the Cardiff Fringe Festival in June 2016 and in the woods at Brainchild Festival in July. The cast was Tom Manson, Ash Scott, Alison Cowling, Daniel Duncan, Sophie Jackson and myself. It went down really well with audiences, and we loved performing it. In November 2017 we performed an extract at The Wardrobe Theatre as part of Tobacco Factory’s Prototype Showcase so that we could garner feedback for further development, where we had a very positive response from the audience, lots of audience members particularly enjoyed our vibe of being an old-fashioned travelling troupe putting on a show, and encouraged us to push that ramshackle vibe further. Which we happily did!

We performed the show again for 2 nights at The Room Above, Bristol, in February 2017. While rehearsing, we developed parts of the show, again having that extra time gave us more objectivity. We wanted to push this travelling troupe concept, so we added another frame in which we had characters as the performers who were introduced at the start, before starting the play. This meant in-between scenes we could revert to those performer characters, and allowed us to be more free with performing the play in a slap-dash way. We also developed certain scenes that we’d had further ideas for. For example, a scene in which the character Derwin reads his diary entries about his and King Silverpoon’s friendship. It was written in rhyme and read as a melancholic song. The concept always reminded me of the video of Eminem’s ‘Stan’, because of the devoted diarist. So in rehearsal we had a little experiment with homaging ‘Stan’, turning Derwin’s rhyme into a rap and adding a parody of Dido’s ‘Thank You’ sample, sung by the King. This went down a storm with audiences. I guess partly because of the juxtaposition of Medieval characters and pop culture, but it’s pushed even further because the pop culture reference is slightly dated by now – so a bit of Nostalgia kicks in? I don’t know, it’s just a very funny scene, to be frank. And so great how it takes different members of the audience different amounts of time to click, and some don’t even know the reference – but for some reason love it too! Another development was the finale, it was a little messy still, and I really wanted to incorporate some more Jacobean-inspired gore, so we stuck in the idiom ‘don’t bite my ear off!’ as part of the final showdown, and had my character bite the King’s ear off. I mean, how could we not?!

The Cabinet of Madame Fanny Du Thé

Below is our pitch for performing this show at Brainchild when it was just an initial idea:

Brainchild Theatre Pitch: WUNDERKAMMER [Working Title]

Inspired by a visit to the Me Collectors Room Wunderkammer Olbricht in Berlin in 2015, we want to devise a new show based on the concept of the ‘Wunderkammer’, otherwise known as a ‘cabinet of curiosities.’

“The practice of maintaining ‘cabinets of curiosities’ evolved during the Renaissance and Baroque. Such cabinets were collectors’ rooms in which precious artworks (artificialia), rare phenomena of nature (naturalia), scientific instruments (scientifica), objects from strange worlds (exotica), and inexplicable items (mirabilia) were preserved. They reflected the standard of knowledge and view of the world at that time.
Our Wunderkammer reanimates this tradition in Berlin once more. It provides an insight into the past and manages to fulfil its original intention of some two to five centuries ago: to transport the visitor into a realm of sheer astonishment—whether by means of the legendary unicorn, ultimately exposed as the tusk of a narwhal, an amber mirror flooded with light fashioned from the “Gold of the North”, the coconut chalice that came into the possession of Alexander von Humboldt and which is adorned with images of Brazilian cannibals, preserved specimens of a Nile crocodile and a great blue turaco, or wooden cabinets that only reveal their mysteries to the curious eye.” – https://www.me-berlin.com/wunderkammer/

Wunderkammers strike us a rich source of inspiration for creating a piece of theatre full of strange and fantastical tales to satisfy a curious audience. The piece will include live music, and be structured like a cabaret; a series of scenes, vignettes, and songs exploring objects found in Cabinets of Curiosities while creating our own theatrical Wunderkammer.

We developed this initial idea by thinking about the character that owns this cabinet of curiosities. Research into cabinets of curiosities told us that their purpose was to reflect how wordly and wise the owner was. They are basically so they could show off to their friends and peers – the cooler their collection, the cooler their life would seem, much like social media nowadays! We created Fanny, giving a spin to the tradition that it would have been men that had cabinets and were able to have adventures to collect curiosities to fill them with. This allowed us to incorporate an aspect of social commentary in terms of gender into the overarching plot. I also watched the film, The Duchess, during this pondering process which ended up having a big impact in the narrative and Fanny’s character. One of the main character traits of Fanny is that she is a huge show off, which derives from this idea of flaunting your cabinet. We made Fanny show off so much it was as if she had something to prove… (which she does!)

I had the idea of inviting audience members to choose the items from the cabinet, and therefore choosing the story Fanny and her servants enact. I know people can be apprehensive about audience participation, but I think if you create the right environment – which I would say is intimate and welcoming – and set up a framework or a particular purpose for the interaction, then audiences can embrace is and it can add a wonderfully inclusive element and create a bond between the characters and audience. See Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan for a perfect example.  We incorporated the audience interaction in other small ways during the scenes – for example, inviting the audience to shout insults at a character or join in with a pirate shanty.

Tom and I came  just came up randomly with the items in the cabinet to inspire each story. We intended to come up with a range of locations for the settings of Fanny’s adventures, and tried to incorporate objects from art, nature and science. The only item based on fact is a Frenchman’s Finger – which I learnt about in this (below) BBC Four documentary. Although we just took the curio, and the completely made up the rest.