Documental Theatre at the Boat Shed
An Unmissable Evening Of Eavesdropping
Go on admit it! Don’t you love to listen in on other people’s conversations?
The beauty of cracking good radio drama is you can revel in this guilty pleasure without being caught. But in an age of iPhones, and iPods, people increasingly listen to audio drama alone, while being jostled by commuters or mithered by children, and have no one to gas to about the characters with afterwards. Now a group of Devon-based playwrights are plotting to buck this trend...
This July Exeter’s historic Boat Shed will be taken over by The Bike Shed Theatre for a pop-up season of events. The Boat Shed once housed Exeter’s Maritime Museum, which celebrated obsolete traditions from a bygone age. So it seems fitting that on 16th July, Documental Theatre will be reinvigorating the long-lost tradition of sitting round the wireless to hear a radio play.
“There is something so intimate about radio drama,” says Documental Theatre’s Cally Hayes, “You create all the images in your head. And if the play is broadcast in a theatre space the audience can immerse themselves in the story and enjoy the reactions of other listeners. Afterwards they can discuss the characters in the bar. All this makes for a really absorbing experience that people haven’t made time for in decades...not since the days of gathering around the wireless for a drama from Auntie Beeb.”
During the “listening evening” on 16th July, appropriately called RADIO HEAD, audience members will be invited to bring knitting and share tea and cake.
There are three short New Writing radio dramas on the bill and there will be time for a short Q &A afterwards, so that people can ask the writers what inspired the audio landscapes in their pieces.
First on the bill is SPLIT SECOND by Cally Hayes, a gripping tale of a couple’s reaction to an unplanned-for antenatal test. The drama unfolds with beautiful sound design by Philip Robinson - “a rawness & vulnerability that struck a chord” It was recorded in Exeter’s Sound Gallery Studios.
Next up is YOU CAN HIDE THE EARTH WITH YOUR HAND by Jon Nash. Two Teenagers, Lewis and Sophie meet on Cley Hill in Wiltshire to watch a meteor shower. Their home town seems so small and boring by comparison but they discover that sometimes the magical and extraordinary thing you are looking for has been right in front of you all along. A theatre version of the script delighted audiences at the Salisbury Fringe in 2015.
Last up is PULLING OUT by Lucy Bell, a “fast paced, emotive and tender” (EXEUNT) story of failed contraception and angry baby mothers, also produced at Exeter’s Sound Gallery, and inspired by conversations with teenage dads. The drama is woven with eye-opening talking heads.
Documental Theatre, which represented Devon in Nation’s Theatre Festival 2016, is blazing a trail with audio drama. They have organised other shared “listening evenings”, one in Fore Street’s Glorious Arthouse Café, and are interested in co-producing small scale radio drama with community groups, and broadcasting plays in prisons and hospital units. This way this most intimate of art forms, can become a truly shared experience.
“Documental Theatre wanted to explore radio drama production because our actors are so ugly. Only joking. We figured that in a climate of arts cuts, radio allows you to create topical, powerful, well-scripted drama, and there is no limit to how many people you can reach, " says Lucy Bell, writer and co-founder of the company. "There is a really exciting grass roots podcast-making scene developing in Devon. As well as listening evenings, Documental would like to explore “Forum Radio” where listeners call in to influence the ending of a radio drama. RADIO HEAD will be a celebration of this endeavour, and hopefully others will be inspired to self-produce radio drama too. Not everyone can get to the theatre and Radio Four doesn’t always represent the diversity of stories to be told out there.”
So get out your earbuds, clean out your ears, and get along to RADIO HEAD at The Boat Shed on 16th July at 6pm. It’s amazing what you hear if you listen closely...
Tickets available online
https://www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk/shows/radio-head/
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