Interview with Peter Cann, September 2015

So, really, just two questions. One is, tell me about your time at Pentabus. And the second one, tell me about any particularly interesting productions that stick in your mind?

My time at Pentabus was interesting because the first time that I worked for Pentabus, I worked as an actor.And that would have been I think in 1979. And then I went away and did lots of other things, and then I came back, later, in the early eighties, and initially again as an actor. But they wanted me to do some directing aswell, so I worked as both.

And then they got a grant from the Arts Council to have a writer in residence, so I applied for that and then became writer in residence. And I think that lasted two years altogether. And then, as that was running out, as the term of that was running out, Jonathan Cross was leaving, and so the job of artistic director came up, and I applied for that, and got the job of artistic director. So, that is in a nutshell the functional bit.

I think that I finished at Pentabus in 1989, so I must have been artistic director from eighty-six, or eighty-five, some time around then. It was interesting, because it was a time of change, and funding changes, and funding structure changes when I was there, from basically being a part of West Midlands Arts to being independent of West Midlands Arts, with its own board of directors etc.That was happening before I took over as artistic director, thatwas during Jonathan’s tenure. And of course the move from Stourport up to where they are now, Bromfield. In fact when I first started working for them, their base was in Kidderminster, in a place that flooded when there was bad rain, flooded from the river. So, I have been in Pentabus in three different locations.

When I first started as writer in residence, Pentabus had two wings, which was the community arts wing, which then became more and more to do with media, with using media as a tool for community development, which then split off and became the Rural Media Company.

We were able to develop aswell as Pentabus a sort of - some people call it a youth theatre, but a lot of the people in it were, most of them were in their twenties and some in their thirties. They became, from that, a theatre company in their own right, ‘In Transit Theatre’. So then we had a sister company for a while, and then another youth theatre or ‘Raw Theatre’, so for a while we had three different sort of sister companies going on.

And then the other big change when I was there was the change in how you look at the structure of theatre companies and arts organisations in general, which was the kind of vogue for ‘consultancies’. And Pentabus got some money from West Midlands Arts to use and have a consultant. So my first thought was, OK, we’ll take the money, but we are not going to have a consultant, we will do something useful with it. But you know, there was a rider on it, and they said that,‘You have to do this and you have to do this, you have to go through this process’. So, that was fine, and what the consultants came up with was that Pentabus needed to re-structure and that the chief executive should not be the artistic director, and it should be a development director, and the artistic director should be a part time post. And so, at the time I was being interviewed for an arts programme, it is what Front Row used to be before it was Front Row, so it was for BBC Radio, and I was being interviewed, and one of the questions was: “So, about this restructuring, where does that leave you?” And off the top of my head, I said: “Out! I am gone, I am not staying.” And so I resigned on Radio 4! And so immediately I had to go and phone in my resignation officially to the chair of the board of directors.

So, there were all those changes and the company grew quite a lot, during that time. And, yes, it was exciting times, I think. We did a whole range of different kinds of theatre ranging from play schemes through to village hall shows. And then I was fortunate enough also to be able to employ two writers in residence during my time there, Penny O’Connor, and Nick Fisher. So we continued to be a new writing company which Pentabus still continues to this day, which is another of its great traditions: of going and taking theatre to people who don’t have easy access to it, and of doing exciting new theatre.

I’ve got another element to my involvement in Pentabus, which was after I left as artistic director, then I came back as a freelance worker, mostly as a writer. And some of the work that I did then was among the most exciting things, I think, because it was when we started doing the big site specific works. A lot of people don’t recognise how pioneering Pentabus was, in doing those. The first one I had done was with Shared Experience in London, and we did it in a way that nobody had done before, and that was Steve Johnstone and I. And then we continued doing the stuff with Pentabus, and we did three. One was Possession, at Witley Court [1995], then the second one was Ringing Down the Shut at Old St Chad’s[1997] and the third one was at LudlowCastle: Comus 2 [1998]. And those were great, with professional actors and musicians, professional stage management etc., and young people. And they were quite an exciting model.

I think that one of the things that Pentabus doesn’t get recognised for, which it should, is that pioneering work, and that kind of site specific theatre, very dynamic site specific theatre, community theatre. Which has got nothing to do with mob caps, and not very much to do with history either, they were more of a dynamic way of approaching what you can do with large casts and interesting sites. So, it was more site responsive that site specific, some of them, you couldn’t have really done anywhere else. So, I think that was pioneering work that Pentabus did, which I would like them to have got more recognition for, than they do. Other people get recognition for things that we were doing first. I am not bitter about it, it makes me smile. But it would have been nice for Pentabus to have had that kind of recognition for the work that they do and always have done.

Pentabus has always in different ways been radical since I was first doing it. One of the most overtly political pieces that we did was at a time of the introduction of the poll tax, and one of my favourite shows was a show called Becca’s Children [1990], which was about the Rebecca riots in Wales in the nineteenth century. And it is an exciting story anyway and it has got lots and lots of elements in which go right back to Pentabus’ routes: the use of folk theatre, the kind of, I suppose the 7:84 influenced style that Pentabus was very successful at. And it was about popular objection to unfair taxation, but in an allegorical form, I suppose. It wasn’t about the poll tax riots, it wasn’t about the poll tax, it was about the tollgates on the roads between the line production and fields in Wales, it was about the same kind of thing. And that was a good example I think, of Pentabus being quite strong, socialist, radical theatre.

Its very essence was of a tradition of radicalism, just by its taking theatre to people who don’t have access to theatre. And West Midlands Arts was very supportive at first in being able to allow that kind of proper subsidy of the arts, where the village halls didn’t have to pay a huge amount of money and it was quite a nominal, because we had enough support for it to be able to be really accessible to a huge number of people, which was very important.

So that was two of the - kind of favourite things. And then another great thing that we did was the first time that we went to Edinburgh Festival. It was with All Quiet on the Western Front [1987-1990], which was the one man play that Steve Johnstone did and I wrote the adaptation and directed it. And that was exciting. There was a lot of resistance from the board at first, understandably, because it is a financial risk, but we were fortunate enough to recoup all of the money and more than it cost to do it, and that show went on for about three years, at different times touring Ireland, touring nationally. And so it was a good show for them.

Another memorable production was Dancing With The Devil [1996]. That was a time when I was free-lancing for the company, and I came back and was asked to write a script for this. And it was one of those shows when everything goes right, from the beginning: you think, this is quite exciting, from the first chats with the company, to them doing it, and a great cast. John Flitcroft and Francis Land were the main actors in it, and an actor musician, and then we used puppets and all kinds of things, and it was just an exciting show.

And another great thing, which was personal for me, because it is great, was Pentabus’ involvement withTeatro do Montemuro, in Portugal, for whom I am still working, after twenty-one years. I have just come back from doing a show with them, and quite often there have been several former Pentabus people working in conjunction with Teatro do Montemuro over the years and that has been a very exciting collaboration, which was begun with their contact with Pentabus.

You talked about the style being very much influenced by 7:84. Could you elaborate?

Yes, it. was theatre which, as Pentabus did, going to - In the early days, going to village halls, almost entirely in Scotland, and the Highlands, and taking committed theatre, and doing it in a very accessible form. Their most famous and influential show is The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Oil, which was - it is a bit misleading how it is described in the form of a ceilidh, it kind of wasn’t, it was in the setting of a ceilidh, in which the play took place. And it used popular theatre traditions, the use of song, and the use of comedy, the use of sketches, use of direct address to the audience, and a very eclectic mixture of things, very much influenced by music hall, I suppose. So, all of those things. I personally was, and still am, was very influenced by that, and a lot of our plays, a lot of Pentabus’ plays, you could see that influence of 7:84.

And apart from the touring aspect, how was that different from Theatre Workshop? What had progressed between Joan Littlewood and John McGrath?

You can see the direct influence, I think it is almostJohn McGrath taking the baton from Joan Littlewood in a sense. Because when Theatre Workshop first started, before they moved into Stratford, they were entirely a touring company.It was only after two years of working with virtually no money that they moved into Stratford East, so there are direct similarities, and obviously similarities in form with the ‘Concert Party’ element of Pentabus. But I think then they moved away from that, and then John McGrath took it on further and going to more isolated places. John McGrath was very passionate about access.

I think that Joan Littlewood’s company wasn’t, despite what people say, it wasn’t a working class company. I am not denigrating it at all, but it wasn’t. Their audience was generally the usual theatre audience, particularly when in was in Stratford East, and when it was touring, it toured to theatres. Whereas John McGrath; the big difference was taking it to those popular venues.

And then again there was another company that was very influential on me, and on Pentabus because I went to work at Pentabus, wasFootsbarn Theatre, who were a Cornish theatre. They took theatre to village halls and to villages and I remember, because I was at university when I first saw them, before I had come across Pentabus, being in a village hall, where I lived, when I was at university, and seeing this incredible piece of theatre, and thinking, that is what I want to do. I’d been excited by all these different forms of theatre,but that was what I wanted to do, and it is what I did.

You talked about the audience for Joan Littlewood. When you were there, who came to see Pentabus shows?

It depended on the show. And also it depended on the village and who was organising it in the village. The broadest audience was always for the Christmas shows. We changed it from being a pantomime style to something different, like a story, original stories.But they had the biggest audience, always packed and always a very broad cross section of audience. And some of the things like Becca’s Children had big audiences aswell, and a big cross section. We did one that was very Joan Littlewood with a show called: Concert Party [1984], and that was done at harvest suppers, or whatever. So those shows which were tied in as John McGrath did, with social events, and also the open air shows, village fetes and stuff,had a huge audience, a different, broad band of audience. Some of the more,I suppose more experimental shows had a smaller section of audience, and also to be honest smaller audiences.

Nick Fisher’s play, The Ballad of Johnny Reece [1989] was a great show but it was really difficult to sell, which was a shame. Whereas‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ [1987-1990], because it was a familiar title, even though it was a one man play, which seemed a ridiculous thing to be doing, a one man play about the first world war, and a German in the first world war, because people knew the film, we sold that quite easily. And then from the reviews at Edinburgh, that was easy to sell.

But, I think,certainly in the earlier days when we were doing a lot of those kind of John McGrath influenced shows, a large cross section of audiences. Some of them - people kind of picked and chose as it became more expensive to book Pentabus shows, because of - putting VAT on village halls made a massive difference to Pentabus, a huge difference. And also when Pentabus had to work harder to get more funding, when funding decreased from West Midlands Arts, and particularly from Hereford and Worcester, we had to charge more, and that was difficult. But I would say, yes, there was a broad section,a broad cross section of audience.

Tree Heskins told us, “When I first got there, everybody said that you can’t put a show on in February because everybody is out lambing. And then I looked at who was actually coming to the shows, and none of them were ever out lambing!”

That analysis is quite right, in that it was harder to get audiences in very busy times. So we never did village hall shows in the summer, for example, because we tied shows to things that were existing, such as the open air shows and fetes. We would do play schemes in the summer obviously,because there was a demand for them, and we’d do street theatre in the summer. August, September, no point, because the harvest was the busiest time, much busier than lambing, even in the border areas.

What used to happen is, there used to be kind of a - I can’t remember the word, but bunches of villages would get together and book Pentabus rather than just as individuals, and particularly in more isolated areas, which would be very, very much influenced by the seasonal year, and what was happening where. But I think that lambing was less of a problem than harvest.

That has just reminded me of another one of our more controversial shows which was called Knock After Dark [1985], which was about the unionisation of small farmers and farm labourers. And that was one which caused quite a lot of divisions in communities, presumably the farming communities, because it obviously had a very left wing stance.

So, what did the people that were uncomfortable with the left wing stance do to express their dissent?

Wrote letters. We used to have quite a lot of letters and complaints saying: ‘We don’t come to the theatre to watch and to be preached at, to see our way of life being challenged.’ And then other people saying: ‘Yes, great, it is good – fantastic!’

That has just reminded me, there is another one that we did, very much with the community arts wing, called Different Drums [1991], which was about the life of traveller communities and clashes between traveller communities and settled communities. We had a great letter about that. The place was Neen Savage. There was a bit in it where we did have fornicating puppets, and we had a letter about our village hall being ‘polluted with this filth’, but we didn’t know whether it was about that or the fact that it was very much on the side of the travelling people, rather than the people who had prejudice against them.