The Wooden Frock

I’d seen The Red Shoes and been swept off my feet by the emotional force of Kneehigh’s theatrical story-telling. Here was theatre that was performed with the simplicity and directness of a child’s poem yet could rend your heart with the eloquence of grand opera. I loved it.

I put the meagre resources of Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) on the table and invite dthe company to create a new show from an Italian folktale. We read hundreds before Emma Rice told Bill Mitchell, Mike Shepherd and me that here favourite was the story of a girl who escaped from her family in a wooden dress, and that she’d read it on the first day.

Emma (whose directorial approach is to urge her collaborators to meet impossible challenges in the knowledge that she will be there to clear up the mess if it goes wrong) then asked me to write the words. Within weeks I found myself at the heart of a theatre-making process quite unlike anything I had experienced. Perhaps this was secret to the Kneehigh style.

We began in a barn in Gorran Haven in Cornwall. The devising team (four actors, a designer, a composer, a lighting designer, Emma and myself) told the story to each other while Emma and Bill evolved a vision for the world in which our play would take place. Act One centred on a comfortable, happy, eccentric family in a land where it never stopped raining; for Act Two, we imagined a bleak, dry, stunted place where just about everything had lost the will to live. We then identified the key characters, brainstormed their defining characteristics (shyness, honesty, cunning, open-heartedness, emotional myopia etc.) and Emma sent us to a costume store to dress each character in turn. Before a word was written Mike Shepherd was wearing a wimple and neat Moroccan slippers and answering to the name of ‘Nursey’. Challenged by Emma to ‘go about his business’, he picked up a can of poison and started inspecting the barn for woodworm.

In this way, the characters and the story were cooked up together by the group. As the people of the play emerged, I wrote words for the scenes they were improvising. Some stuck, some didn’t, and gradually the dialogue for a first draft of the play took shape.

In parallel with this process, Emma would issue ludicrous challenges to all members of the team. ‘I think we all agree that we will need a song to end this scene’, she would say, eyeing composer Stu Barker and me. ‘Can you write something by lunchtime? Don’t worry if it’s rubbish’. Alongside the rubbish (including a call-and-answer jig with the lyric ‘Come in Come out Come In Come Out Come In Come Out of the Rain!’) we wrote all the songs in the script through this comically abrupt procedure.

As a writer, I was treated in just the same way that Emma treats the actors, or indeed all members of the company. I was asked to produce material, which (under her direction) was then woven into scenes and finally a play. By then, of course, I was enjoying the more conventional chores of rewriting, shaping and editing the show during its rehearsals and previews. But that first workshop – that room full of strange and gifted people cajoled by Emma Rice to explode with ideas and possibilities – produce dthe most inspiring atmosphere I’ve ever had the pleasure to work in.

Tom Morris – Writer, The Wooden Frock.