Interview: 'We're Interested in Stories Outside Big Urban Centres': Pentabus Artistic Director Elle While On Bringing Rural Theatre to the Stage with DRIFTWOOD

Pentabus and ThickSkin’s new production Driftwood is currently touring across the UK. Directed by Elle While and Neil Bettles, and written by Bruntwood Prize Winner Tim Foley, the show is a story about love, hope and belonging.

BroadwayWorld spoke to Pentabus Artistic Director and Driftwood co-director Elle While about the show, collaborating with ThickSkin, one of the most exciting parts of the scriptwriting process and the importance of rural theatre.

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For anyone who has not yet seen Driftwood, please tell us a little more about the show.

It’s a two-hander. It’s a story that revolves around two brothers that have been estranged for a number of years and they meet back up on the beach in the town where they grew up on the North-East coast. Their dad is dying and they’re working out how to deal with that. Alongside that they’re working out their own take on life and how to rebuild their relationship. The story focuses on the fundamentals of who they are and their relationship, but around that is a bigger, mythical storytelling that comes from the tales of the North-East coast. There’s a political undercurrent that runs through the play as well.

What has the audience reaction been so far during the tour?

It’s been on tour for a number of weeks now, so it has been amazing to see the response [from the audience] and hear the feedback at the end of the show. The relationship between the brothers is so brilliantly drawn, you feel that they’re incredibly relatable - Moved by how love can develop and move and shift and change, but still be there.

What drew you to the script?

The script wasn’t written. I spoke to the playwright a lot about what he might want to write. We are in a brilliant position at Pentabus where we commission a playwright. We commission the script before it has even been put to paper. It’s an exciting part of the process.

Tim Foley was the writer in residence at Pentabus for a year, so the brilliant thing was that he knew the theatre company, he knew our ethos and how we felt about things. I just really enjoyed having conversations with him where I was like, ‘Write about where you come from.’ We’re the nation’s rural theatre company. We’re really interested in stories from outside those big urban centres.

Speaking of which, Driftwood is currently touring to village halls and theatres across the UK…

As the nation’s rural theatre company, we platform rural stories, rural playwrights and rural artists, but we always make sure we reach audiences in rural communities who don’t get to see world class theatre like that. We always know that every show we make has to get to a certain amount of people. We are developing our hybrid tours, so we tour into these communities but we tour into theatres as well. I feel it’s important that they [rural stories] get platformed in urban places as well.

Can you talk to me a little bit more about the importance of rural theatre?

The rural touring network essentially has two seasons. So you have the spring season and the autumn season. If that village hall or that community manages to book two plays in a year, that’s like a real event for all those people to gather together. They really do gather together with their communities. It’s such a different thing of arriving at a theatre as a completely anonymous person as you might do in a big city, but you go with your friends and your community members. You share in this live story telling experience. That’s powerful in so many ways. Bringing people together.

The production is a collaboration between two theatre companies - Pentabus and ThickSkin. How did the collaboration come about?

Myself and Neil Bettles who is the artistic director of ThickSkin and co-director of this production, are really good friends and colleagues from projects we’ve worked on before. He’s an exceptional director and the way he approaches text is through movement. I’m very much text based, so we felt it would be really great to bring our different skill sets. It was such a joy to have both our brains in there all the time. When I read the script, I just knew that Neil would have an epic response to it, because it’s this two-hander that is touring theatres and village halls, but the story is massive. Those big ideas really need someone who is amazingly creative particularly I think.

Driftwood is described as a ‘physical and cinematic production’ - What decisions did you make as artistic directors to achieve this?

We’ve got this amazing Video and Creative Captions Designer called Sarah Readman - they’re absolutely amazing, an incredible artist. They’ve integrated every single word into the design of the piece. There’s all this extraordinary, real footage of the area and really hyper-visualised designs working around water, sky and waves constantly running on the back of the design- so the words go along with the images and make it feel cinematic.

Everything that ThickSkin do comes from a very physical place and I love working physically as-well, so that has bled into every part of the production. There’s lots of text as well, so there might be a scene that lasts quite a long time while they’re talking, but because they [the actors] work so physically from day one, there’s a physical storytelling journey going on as well.

As a director you have worked on productions including The Globe’s Hamlet and the West End revival of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Have you taken anything you have learnt from working on these shows and applied this to your artistic direction for Driftwood?

As a director, you’re constantly gathering your suitcase as full as you can. I do think consciously I go, ‘oh, I’m going to use that technique’, but definitely the shows I’ve worked on, if you spread them all out on the floor, you’d definitely see how the patchwork all stitches together and how that piece of work might have influenced that piece of work.

Is there anything else you’d like to add about Driftwood?

We’ve got the most incredible creative team and actors on this project. I think the companies we’ve formed recently have just proved that you can make the most astonishing work in the most unusual places.

Driftwood is currently touring across the UK until Sunday 19 November.

Photo Credit: Pentabus / Multitude Media

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