Mettle: Arts, Domesticity, and the Rise of the One-Man Show
VICTORIA KINGHAM
It’s well known around these parts that some of the finest artists, musicians, and creatives of all kinds make their home in the area. It also seems unusual that so many original projects take place in premises that double as private houses of great character and versatility.
Nicholas Collett
There’s Crown House – living quarters with a beautiful small theatre and bar space on the ground floor, and the oldest house in St Leonards. Then there’s a smaller and more Bohemian version of that at 74 Norman Road, where poetry and song abound on the ground floor. Then there’s the classical element at the end house in beautiful Uplands, where an enormous ballroom, once hosting salon balls for the upper middle class, doubles as a rehearsal space for famed experimental opera productions.
There’s The Beacon – a family home and a thriving family business – I’ve seen experimental music with film, singer-songwriters, jazz bands, and free improvised music there. Explore The Arch, too, is a lovely old house in Charles Road that houses youth music, theatre, and literature workshops and grows them up into accomplished performers of all kinds. Domestic Theatre is a unique genre developed in response to that house, where the audience follows performers from room to room and the house becomes an integral part of the performance. Also in St Leonards, in Tower Road, is the Maker’s House.
The Makers House is run by a live-in couple, Chris New and Liz Mattey, who together tot up an astonishing number of years’ acting, teaching, and performance experience. Their publicity is low-key, but they have built a substantial reputation for the quality of their workshops, retreats, plays, and talks. Under their auspices Nicholas Collett – actor, writer, researcher – will present his self-written one-man show Mettle.
the Rise of the One-Man Show
We talked of the changing face of theatre in this country, and the fact that touring theatre receives just 13 per cent of what it used to in public subsidy. The rise of One-Person Theatre must surely be a corollary of this.
Over the past few years a number of excellent examples of the genre have been staged in Hastings: Patrick Kealey’s frenetic and funny Archy and Mehitabel, Bev Lee Harling’s magical and autobiographical Hey Good Lookin’, and Steve Furst’s multi-faceted Fagin among them. Coming up this Christmas, Jud Charlton, fresh from his role in the latest Spider-Man blockbuster, will present a one-man version of A Christmas Carol twice a day for ten days. It’s no wonder that actors are often reported as suffering from exhaustion. It’s a genre that takes an enormous amount of stamina – one actor, alone on stage, for up to two hours.
But Collett is no stranger to the idea. He says he was inspired by Guy Masterson’s acclaimed single-person presentation of 60 characters in Under Milk Wood, which has been staged and praised all over the world. While they were talking after the show, Masterson encouraged him to write a solo piece – just have a go, he advised.
He did. First he wrote a factual-historical piece about the Battle of Britain – but the BBC got there first. To get round that, he fictionalised it, and has toured that show, Spitfire Solo, internationally since then. Then there was Nelson, The Sailor’s Story that he has played in Adelaide, Australia, and here in the hold of the Cutty Sark. He has re-imagined Shakespeare too, in Your Bard – where Shakespeare defends himself (in the pub) against an academic who doesn’t believe he wrote what he did. There are several others – you can see details on Collett’s website.
SHOWING METTLE
Banned from public performance during the Covid period, Collett turned to researching recently-released Admiralty records and writing, and the result is Mettle, which is based not only on his father’s wartime heroic events, but also on some previously-unknown personal information learnt from his father, which had a substantial effect on his own life.
The piece is about his father’s service on the destroyer escorts to the Atlantic convoys – vulnerable merchant ships that brought essential food, equipment and raw materials to Britain from North America and what was then the Empire. These ships were so important, but so exposed to attack, that convoys were organised with a number of naval escorts. Collett’s father served on one of these destroyers in some major conflicts involving injury and death. Like many World War II veterans he never talked about it, until one day in 1993 – his golden wedding anniversary. He took Nicholas aside and began to open up about his fighting experiences, but also about his lighter moments and shore leave adventures.
STAGE DIRECTION
A very impressive feature of one-person shows is how well the actor handles a very minimal set – Kealey (to use an example I mentioned before) used several hats and a chair to present about twenty characters. Lee Harling used a wonderful metal-sculptured tree. “The default production setting,” Collett mused, “is a bare hall with some chairs in it.” For Mettle, he went on: “it’s kind of more figurative. I have a table and chair that kind of become other things in the environment. We use a few props and a hat to be able to move between worlds and times and places.”
His director, Gavin Robertson, necessarily contributes a great deal to this very individual staging. They’ve been working, touring and creating together for almost 20 years. Robertson is himself an enormously talented actor and director – The Times has described him as “versatile and energetic” – and his extensive body of outstanding stage work can be seen on his website.
There’d be more to say had I but world enough and time. We are fortunate that artists of such accomplishment are more than willing to appear here in a place known by tourists for its Norman history, its old town and its ice-cream, but which is fast becoming a well-known hub for its pool of astonishing talent in all aspects of the Arts. Theatre is just one of many. In Mettle we can look forward to a unique experience at a unique venue.
Details and tour dates: nicholascollett.com. Tickets at Makers House: makershousehastings.co.uk; Explore The Arch: explorethearch.com/index.php; Crown House tinyurl.com/nhfpxbjh; The Beacon: beaconhastings.com; 74 Norman Road (Mike’s Place) facebook.com/p/Mikes-St-Leonards-61554299780749.
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