National Theatre Wales Community

The Last Five Years - R&D Leeway Productions; Initial response and thoughts.

Thank you to emerging director Luke Hereford for this blog about his week with us at Leeway Productions. Great to be able to share practice with up and coming creatives. Glad you had a great time Luke. Have a read:

When you say that you’ve been working on an interpretation of an existing piece of Musical Theatre that is being reimagined to fully accommodate a deaf audience and doubling its cast size, the response is often somewhere within the realms of perplexed. In fact, despite having entered into several conversations of what to expect with Angharad Lee, Artistic Director of Leeway Productions, prior to the week of Research and Development of The Last Five Years,
I was unsure entirely what to expect myself.

What unfolded was an exploratory week, touching on the difficulties and hurdles there are to overcome and explore when this exciting project eventually enters into production and begins to take shape further.

This was my second project working alongside Angharad and Leeway productions, and bringing this kind of work to be developed within a remote area of the Valleys is the very first signifier of the great work that Leeway are starting to create. By placing this work within the Valleys, Leeway is upholding their commitment to bring theatre outside of Cardiff, and into areas that not only strive for further artistic development and need further exposure to the boundary pushing theatre that the company is beginning to platform; the very surroundings of rolling hills and terraced houses allowed us as a company to realise that these are the kind of audiences that Welsh theatre ought to be reaching out to, to keep the work inclusive and widespread across the country, and this is exactly what the Leeway Productions is beginning to do with this project.

The Last Five Years is a two hander musical written by Tony Award Winning composer Jason Robert Brown. It is established, well-respected and admired within the Musical Theatre world, and it’s a piece that has been close to me for a number of years as an individual. Despite having a solid understanding of the Musical, and a previous close relationship with it, exploring this piece in such a unique manner allowed for my own rediscovery of a work that I thought I knew back to front. Observing a process that is specifically accessible to a deaf audience might seem as it has the potential to become “inaccessible” to someone like myself, a hearing audience member with an idea of what this existing piece of theatre is and how it should be done, but already I felt that new themes were being drawn upon, and messages that are seldom communicated in existing productions of this musical are beginning to be communicated, even in these early stages of development, which was somewhat unprecedented and incredibly exciting.

The concept of bringing in two deaf dancers to portray the alter-egos of Jamie and Cathy seemed to have endless explorative possibilities, and so many questions arose: can Jamie see his alter-ego? Can he only see Cathy’s? Do the alter-ego and the character have their own conversations? The questions were endless, and they dictated the conversations that would surely arise in the rehearsal room of a production; but through our Choreographer Mark, performers Kevin and Gareth, and further assistance from BSL interpreter, Sami, collaborative discussions began to take shape, and quickly we realised through task-based exploration facilitated by Angharad, and with a focus on making this a clearly communicated concept that stays true to telling the story that Jason Robert Brown has created, that this concept can really work.

Entering the world of communication when exploring how to best make accessible theatre is a huge ballpark, with an unfathomable amount of considerations to weigh up; everything from the differences between British Sign Language (BSL), Sign Supported English (SSE) and Visual Vernacular, to the different levels of understanding that deaf audiences may or may not have of each of these communicative tools are things that as a hearing individual I have never before considered, or even thought to consider. We quickly found that discussing what each of these different variations of communication will do for an audience was the best way to move forward, and although this is no quick feat, in order for this production to be a communicative and accessible one, patience really is our best friend in this process. After spending the week preparing for a sharing of our collaborative process and fine tuning the work on two full songs for Jamie and his alter-ego, the skeleton of how this process might begin to build on a production-based scale began to take shape. There are no doubt acute chords to strike with this piece in order to ensure that Jason Robert Brown’s original concept for the musical is being adhered to and that this isn’t a gimmick; the most important goal from Angharad’s initial vision and concept is that each audience member takes something away from this as a piece of theatre; our deaf audiences may interpret a scene and experience the whole production in a decidedly different way to our hearing audiences, and that is by all means encouraged. As for hearing audiences such as myself, I have already touched upon the new themes that this process has begun to extract, and that’s from in depth work on only two songs. I also would like to think that hearing audiences who seldom consider the needs of a deaf, or limited access audience, are educated and enlightened by this production. As a Director, this process of exploration has allowed for me to consider how I can best make my future work limitless and accessible for anyone who can purchase a ticket, and that is an incredibly important development in my own craft and toolkit as an Emerging Director.

It’s exciting, it’s bold and brave, and most prevalently from this week, it has shown that the possibilities are near enough limitless, sometimes to an overwhelming degree; but with a team of sharply focused individuals who are working towards a musical that is accessible and enjoyable for all our audience members, and with a great deal of focussed patience and collaborative discussion from every individual involved, this will make for a production like no over, and one that no matter how much or little involvement I might have in the future of this production, I look forward to seeing how it changes the future stepping stones for Musical Theatre in Wales.