Interview with Steve Johnstone, September 2015

Interview with Steve Johnstone, September 2015

I started at Pentabus as an actor, in, I think, about eighty-six.The company was based in Kidderminster then. We moved to the present place when I had been there for about three or four years, I think. At that point, Pentabus had a more or less permanent acting company, which was great, so it meant that if you got a job, you could more or less stay there for a while. So I got there as an actor, and I had been doing a bit of acting and a bit of directing. And actually, the more directing that I did, the harder that it got for people to hire you as an actor, because they didn’t like having another director in the room. They didn’t believe that you could do that separation - ‘This is my job now, and I don’t care how you are directing it frankly, I have enough to worry about learning my lines!’ It did get to be a funny thing where people didn’t quite like that. Peter Cann was in charge then, and he started giving me some jobs directing for the company, which was quite good, and so I was doing intermittent work for them, and actually I was thinking that I was going to give up acting altogether and I was going to give up theatre altogether, because I was getting a bit bored with the kind of routines of doing things that I wasn’t quite satisfied with.

While I had been in East Anglia, I had read ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, which is the Erich Maria Remarquebook, and I remember lying in bed reading it, after we had been doing a show, and thinking that this would actually make a great one man show. And when I was working for Pentabus, I saw Pete one day and I said: “Would you mind reading this? And do you think that we could do it as a one man show?” And he read it and he really liked it. And it was the first time, I think, in ages, that I felt really committed to doing something that actually resounded for me. It was quite an important thing to do, and I really enjoyed doing it. It was really hard work, and it kind of renewed my faith in being able to produce theatre that was both high quality and demanding of its audience. But actually it sat beautifully in village hall locations and community locations and could go from that kind of informal space into studio theatres and lots of different places. For me, that was a bit of a turning point in my life in that I started to realise that - certainly in that period that there had become a kind of way of doing theatre for community audiences which had to have music in it, had to have lots of- you had to do things ‘that way’. And for me, I was getting a bit bored with it. I mean, I liked doing it, and I played guitar and I sang along, did all the kinds of things that you do, but I was getting a bit bored with it. And then I did this, and it had no songs in it and it was miserable as fuck, and the audience sat there and it was really right in their faces. And because we were so close, because we were literally so close, it was a very emotional experience and at the end of every show there would be at least one person dabbing their eyes, and quite often a man, trying to hide it. It was great. Because we had Tim Brierley, who was doing the stage management on it and he would get the speakers out and he would crank them up and every time an explosion went off in the village halls, there would be dust shaking down from the rafters. Everybody felt that they were under fire!

And it went really well [1987-90] and we took it to Edinburgh and it got, you know, really good reviews. And I think for people like myself and Peter Cann, it kind of energised us in a way, of thinking, actually what people wanted was a really vibrant theatrical experience and they didn’t care what that was. Yes, it could contain songs and the rest of it, but people really wanted to be swept along and be part of that kind of immediate and powerful theatre experience, and in the immediacy of places like village halls you could actually really make that work. Because there was no real separation between you and the audience, and you can talk directly to people and you can be in the audience and you can do things in different ways and really start to make things happen.

Could you be a bit more specific about the usual ingredients of community theatre in the eighties?

I am not accusing everyone else of doing it, they were probably doing brilliant things and I wasn’t seeing them. But it was like, you would do a Christmas show, and you know, and that would quite oftenhave pantomime type elements in it and lots of companies did a Christmas show, and they always had music in them and you know they were quite often different takes on the usual stuff. And then there was a lot of that kind of ‘cabaret style’ theatre, where you would have lots of episodicelements and songs again, quite a lot of times, songs were put. It felt like the theatrical experience was being narrowed for the sake of appealing to the wider audience. It was the sort of assumption that if you put in front of an ordinary group of people, you can’t necessarily do the kind of theatre that you do at Birmingham Rep because it is not particularly appropriate or - there was a kind of slightly patronising...I don’t really want to say that, because a lot of people were doing a lot of really good work, and I probably just wasn’t seeing it, you know? I think for me I just got sick of going, ‘Right, now it is this time for the Christmas show, and we will do something slightly more serious, and now we will do the summer and it will be outdoor work, and then we’ll do the autumn and we will do a very short tour or something, and now we are back to the Christmas show’, and it just felt like: zum, zum, zum, zum. It felt like not stretching the audience and you weren’t demanding of the audience. And as soon as you are not demanding of your audience, you are not actually feeding the audience very well either, all you are really doing is passing the time with each other. I think that your audience needs to have that journey where it feels really moved, in whatever way, whether it is moved to laughter or to tears, or made to think.

The reactions to ‘All Quiet’ were really good, because almost everybody that you took it to - it was slightly harder to book, it has to be said, but everybody that you took it to really liked it. And then it really took off, and it really ran well, and we did it in lots of places. I remember doing it in the church at BishopsCastle and it was peppered with scatological language and bad language, but even there, there was a great moment right at the end, where- it is almost inevitable that the narrator gets killed, and so there is just a little monologue where that is said, and then the lights came back up and then I bowed and then nobody clapped. And I went off and nobody clapped, and it was absolute silence for blinking ages. And then everybody clapped. And it was a very, very strong theatrical moment, where you feel that everybody has been so engrossed. For me, I wanted to do more of that. I wanted more of that and less of the ‘let’s just make everybody happy and not challenge people’. So it was a really important thing for me.

My understanding is that you took ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ to Irelandas well?

Yes. ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ went to Edinburgh, and Ireland.

We did two different visits to Ireland, and they were hilarious both times. And the final one, which was the final bit of it, we ended up in Dublin, and had a terrible time, because on the first night, we were in Project, I think it was called, the Arts Centre, and all the sound failed! It was heavily reliant on sound, and the reviewer from the Irish Times gave it the most terrible reviews: ‘How you can expect an actor to do this without any sound?’ Although I completely agreed with him. He savaged it. We had a brilliant tour before that, when it went round Galway and all around Ireland, a lovely time.

Pete and I did a lot of work for other people outside of Pentabus, because Pete left Pentabus shortly after that. That is when Robert took over, and Robert kept bringing us back and re-commissioning different groups of people to do things, and we did some nice shows, really good shows. I think that one of the last ones that we did when Peter was there was a thing called: ‘Becca’s Children’ [1989-1990], which was about the destroying of the toll gates in Wales, and the riots. And we did it exactly the time when the Poll Tax was being introduced, and that was the joy of actually having a permanent company of actors, because what you could actually do is we had a kind of gap in the schedule, and we kind of went, ‘this is terrible, all this poll tax and we should be doing something about it’, and somebody, and I don’t know who it was, said, “What about all these people who were going round and destroying the toll gates in Victorian times?”

And we went and did some kind of research, because it was right along that Welsh border, and so it was perfect material for where we were working, and we did this great show. It was really good fun, really good fun, but again, quite hard on the audience with a lot of physical theatre elements and there were two songs in it; both Welsh hymns, and there was a lot of jumping about and fighting. But the way the sequence of the show moved, was that you kind of set up how, you know, people were being pressed by the situation and how right that they were to stand up for themselves, and you know, you inveigled the audience into taking part in all those things and again we had them stamping a lot and lots of dust flying around in places. And then as it progressed and the riots themselves turned darker, the audience then became, because they really enjoyed all the stamping and shouting and all of those kinds of things, they then became implicated in the violence that was happening as part of it. And that worked really well, and people again really enjoyed it.

So for me, those times were quite liberating really and being able to do things and appeal to people and have the same sort of enjoyment like you were commenting on things - because it was very straightforward for people to jump from the Poll to the toll and feel that these things go on and that protesting is alright. So, ‘Becca’s Children’ was another good one.

So, after Robert left we, Purvin and I had done quite a few shows together, (‘Becca’s Children’ was the first one that we did), and then we did several others. And then what happened just before, or just as, Robert left - I can’t quite remember the sequence of it, but West Midlands Arts, as was then, withdrew their funding from the company and said that they were going to close the company down. And Robert and the kind of pool of performers and theatre makers and all the rest of it that were around then organised a campaign to keep the company open. And we did things like giving out the postcards at all the shows every week and bombarded Arts Council with thousands of postcards, and wrote letters. And eventually Arts Council reversed their decision, and they kept the company open and at that point, I don’t quite know the sequence, whether Robert had decided once the company was saved, he was going to leave, or whatever, but it was at that transition period just as the company had been saved,Purvin and I then applied for the job as the co-artistic directors. The company had written a manifesto of sorts to Arts Council to try and save the company and talking about a greater concentration on stories, and using the stories of the area and making the work for people of the area and making it work for the people of the area and trying to take that work further afield as well.

And Purvin and I had this slightly comical notion - we sort of knew that we weren’t going to get anywhere trying to get things out on a national stage, and so our pitch at the interview was that we wanted to go for a kind of very strong local presence, and then try and find international partners to be interested in what we are doing. And it sort of worked to be honest. Because we did quite a lot of work in Portugal, and we ended up doing the work in the Punjabas well, and it did sort of work as a notion. But that is where Purvin was really influential with his real commitment to wanting to keep theatre in the region, of the region, and his real knowledge of the region. And so when we started putting shows together, I think that one of the first shows that we did was a Christmas show, a touring show and we knew that people liked Christmas shows but we didn’t want to do any of the kind of normal kind of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ kind of malarkey. And Purvin was saying that there are thousands of legends round here that we should be using and we did one:‘Vaughan the Terrible’ [1992]. And it was great, because for us, for me and Purvin, what we would say was that, whenever we started something, we would start by talking about the design simultaneously with the creation of the script and the idea. So, that we would have those ideas together right at the beginning. And so with ‘Vaughan the Terrible’, Purvin had this real longing, instead of doing things at the ends of village halls, he wanted to do something down the middle, with little kind of stage areas at either end. And so we made this kind of long cat-walky type thing, that had a stage at one end and a smaller stage area at the other. The great advantage of it was that you could get more people in the front row, because you had two front rows for a start and they were very, very long, and so most of the times that we did it, we only had about three or four rows, and so people had very good views and were very immersed in what was going on. And we also discovered that what you could do, underneath this long cat walk,was if you put skate boards at either end, the actors could lie on the skate boards and go shooting down under the traverse, really quickly! We were doing this thing about ‘Vaughan the Terrible’, he was this nobleman who was in league with the devil, or whatever, but he could shape-shift and so sometimes he was a dog, sometimes he would be a fly, and sometimes he would be a bull, sometimes he would be a man. He was meant to be held in a snuff box, cast into a pool, and so the show started with two kids fishing about in a pool and finding a snuff box, and opening it, and out flies the fly that was Vaughan the Terrible! It was really good actually, because I suppose that the whole traverse was maybe eighteen inches high, slightly higher at the other end but not much. And we worked ways like jumping into a hole at one end, so it looked like you were falling straight down a shaft, and getting on a skate board and shooting up the other end and then popping up the other side and going “Uuurgh!”, and the whole audience goes “Ugh!” It was just fantastic. John Flitcroft, who played Vaughan, was very good physically, and very good at doing those kinds of things. But on a skate board you can move really fast as well, because you can use the sides of the thing to keep you going, and it is fairly silent, and we put strips of carpet down, and he went shooting down, put on a mask and popped out. There was one bit where he appears as the bull, with the bull’s head on, like a Minotaur, in the middle of the stage, which is only this big… (GESTURES).Purvin had put this trap door in, which was just loose, it wasn’t hinged or anything, and John just flipped it open and jumped onto the stage, so it was like he had manifested in the middle of the village hall, and it was really entertaining quite terrifying as well. I remember we used to have all the kids on the front row, and as soon as John popped up, they would all be in the second row in no time at all!

The excitement of doing that was really the location of it and it felt like really visceral theatre that was really enjoyable on all sorts of levels. But it still had the elements that people wanted, which was that mystical, magical,musical, you know, it had all of those things, but it felt much more located for us. And the design values were just brilliant. Purvin made beautiful sets, and the masks were great and everybody got really committed and it went exceptionally well.