A Room Somewhere
Patrick Kealey, Artistic Director of Hastings’ Theatre Nation, offers a personal manifesto, a provocation and a call to arms.
Great theatre can happen anywhere in principle – a room, a street, a park, even abandoned pop-up spaces. What’s important is that it communicates ideas with imagination in a public forum. That for me is where the power of it lies. Which is fortunate really because here in Hastings, there is a very limited theatrical eco system. Hastings and St Leonards can be a wonderful place to live and enjoy high quality cultural activity, but, personally, I’ve yet to hear of anyone who moved here for its vibrant theatre scene. Visual arts maybe, music certainly, theatre… er, no, not so much.
So I created a theatre company, Theatre Nation, to produce the sort of work I felt wasn’t being represented down here nearly enough. Work that aims to be passionate, visionary and uncompromising; and that’s why, last year, I produced a radically re-imagined version of Waiting for Godot in conjunction with the internationally renowned maverick provocateur David Glass and his Ensemble.
Sometimes, like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, I dream “All I want is a room somewhere.” Not to eat chocolate or warm my hands and feet, lovely as that would be right now, but a studio space somewhere in this town I could go and rehearse and create bold theatre visions with like-minded dreamers. A sort of permanent theatre laboratory where local professional makers could try out and refine their ideas, whether it was a new script or an entirely new way of working.
At a time of uncertainty, with a government hell bent on shutting down debate and resistance to its authoritarian methods, theatre matters more not less. It’s a public space where passion, original ideas and political subversion can flourish. At its best it’s not a passive experience but requires active collaboration between performers and spectators. Theatre can still be a radical and powerful way for a society to look at itself directly in the mirror.
It’s one of the few public forums left to us to speak the unspeakable or inspire and shock and provoke. In other words, to feel what it’s like to be wholly, completely, unreasonably human and alive in our here and now. To open up the infinite possibilities of the imagination. It’s a means to fight the drift towards fear, complacency, isolation and nostalgia in mainstream discourse. To offer audiences alternative ways of seeing the world.
I dream of a space to not only put on plays but to keep questioning “What is theatre for?” A place for passion, solidarity, community and ensemble. That won’t settle for the tried and tested. For hungry new voices and genuine experimentation. What is missing for a town our size, is a reliable, sustainable year-round space to develop and experiment with new ideas, new means of expression. It can and has been done, often in places much less promising than our town – which already has a wealth of talented practitioners and a future generation with creative energy and ideas waiting to be discovered and nurtured.
A room somewhere. That’s all it would take to start. Who’d like to join me? For more information visit www.theatrenation.org
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