Guest Blog: Paines Plough Artistic Directors Katie Posner and Charlotte Bennett On New Digital Plays

Week one of lockdown and our current show Run Sister Run, due to open at Soho Theatre, has been cancelled. It is our first season as new Joint Artistic Directors, and it feels like it's over before it has even begun. We are all working from home, adjusting to the new normal and considering what our immediate future as a company looks like.

We start with asking ourselves, what's our priority right now? We answer it quickly: writers are the beating heart of Paines Plough and without them we cease to exist. Our primary objective has to be to offer them support through this time - money to survive and opportunities to still be heard.

Like many other organisations, we look to enhance our digital programme and begin by considering what online content most excites us and what we are engaging with. We discover we're still craving the live experience, in whatever way that can exist. Joe Wicks' live bootcamp means we squat harder than when we're on catch-up and he's 'not looking'. Instagram live becomes our favourite form of distraction. Crucially, we agree we have an attention span of around 10 minutes (on a good day).

As lockdown establishes, we see a greater engagement with our existing audio app Come To Where I'm From. It's a collection of mini-plays written and read by writers nationally about the place they call home. Our own homes have now become our everything: a place to work, live, smile, cry, thrive and survive. We have started to notice that cupboard full of receipts we never cleared out, wonder if we should paint our walls a bright shade of blue, and panic when the chocolate stash runs low. We have started looking at our homes through familiar yet unfamiliar eyes. Maybe there's something in that?

We agree that there is, and begin considering a reframe of Come To Where I'm From, where we connect with writers nationally and hear what home means to them at this time. Rather than just hear them, we agree we still want to see them - Come To Where I'm From always starts with the live experience before they're audio-captured, and seeing writers speak their own stories is a beautiful thing. We decide to ask writers to self-film, and so Come To Where I'm From is born - 31 new short mini-plays with seven national partners about home released as videos weekly on YouTube.

We then hit a stumbling block. What about those people who don't have access to digital opportunities? One of the things we have always done at Paines Plough is reach new audiences who wouldn't naturally engage with theatre. We talk about grandparents isolating on their own who we call regularly. Family members shielding missing human connection, and those without the money for a smartphone or laptop. Could these plays still reach them, and how?

We find the answer in going back to basics. Let's call them over the phone - read the plays like a slightly bizarre live radio play. It will be live and imperfect in that glorious way theatre is. And so the caller service was founded -plays read live over the phone by brilliant actors to isolated communities. These range from 1-1 calls to conference calls with networks of isolated older people and live Zoom performances into care homes. They are messy and bizarre - you often hear a lawnmower in the back (like the equivalent of a noisy crisp rustler in the auditorium) - but, most importantly, they feel live and like they could only have ever been born out of this moment.

So, we find our plan of action and purpose for what digital experiences mean to us in this moment. But wait - are we missing something? This is a global pandemic, after all. We begin to talk to new networks across Europe, and it turns out the theme of home is a universal language. So we create The Place I Call Home - a brand-new programme connecting international writers to create new work together, in isolation, across borders. We will bring two writers together to co-author a new bilingual play about home that will be realised with digital artist collaborators and shared across the digital platform.

At a time where we're isolated from one another through social distancing, we want these digital projects to help connect us and create a community - a home.

Watch the plays on the Paines Plough YouTube channel

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