How being a mother is a huge bonus when setting up a theatre company. No, really!
by Cat Rosario
I met Carrie at the Wilderness festival last summer, after I accidentally dropped my bra by her tent on the way to the showers in the dark. She heard me prowling round it and thought I was nicking her tent pegs. She is an actress and an incessant storyteller, and I am a writer, and we were both frustrated at being at the whim of theatres. So we decided a few months ago to set up our own theatre company, and call it Pure Fluke. We wanted to create theatre that playfully remixed classic texts but didn’t take itself too seriously. And we really wanted to do a romcom. But the question was how to produce a play with the summer holidays looming and our eleven-year-old sons needing entertainment? Then we hit on a great solution: get them doing some of the hard graft, and give them the odd tube of wine gums as payment. They have learnt so much about set design, props and promotions, and brought the fresh, startling perspective that kids have.
The inspiration for our play Abandon, which was shown earlier this autumn, came from a fascination with internet dating. How this is a completely new courtship ritual where the rules of engagement are deeply confused with both heart-breaking and hilarious results. As well as enduring love affairs. Whoever we talked to had their own - or a ‘friend’s’ - internet dating nightmare story. One that stands out for sheer surrealism is a friend who hit it off so much with a man she met on the internet that on their first date they ended up back at his house. In the morning he was a little cool, and so she headed off in a huff. A few hours later she got a furious text, accusing her of stealing one of his garden gnomes. No protestations from her would convince him, and he launched a month-long campaign of online stalking, demanding his gnome back.
But there was another story we found so compelling – of a woman’s apparently perfect online revenge against a man who had left her, and who she still loved - that it became the seed for our play Abandon. I can’t say what it as that would give it away. But it doesn’t involve gnomes.
At the time I was reading a children’s version of Dante’s Inferno to my son, Ebi, and I realised that this medieval, macabre poem about Hell offered a perfect new lens through which to look at contemporary internet dating. The Inferno begins with Dante lost in a dark forest. He is thirty-five years old and doesn’t know how to live any more. So he sets off on a road trip – over a long weekend - deep into the centre of the earth where hell lurks. There he sees displayed all the sins of the flesh. And by the end, it’s such a relief to get out of this freezing hell and get back to the earth’s surface and see the purity of the stars.
So our play begins in the dark forest of internet dating, where these struggles between instantly gratifying every desire or having some kind of moral integrity are played out pretty much every time someone picks up a mouse. We are all Dantes, in the pathless forest, having to choose how to act - and then live with, or try to evade, the consequences. Our heroines in the forest, are two Irish sisters living in Peckham, one of whom is herself a single mother with a difficult teenage daughter, who meets a much younger man online. Being mother ourselves gives us so much material …
Technical issues have given us the greatest challenges. We were badly let down by a man who was going to get us a wind machine. My son suggested that instead we should build a Leonardo Da Vince style machine, which we can wire all the audience up to, and when they peddle we get wind. Perhaps even have a line of discreetly hidden cannons and when they peddle hard enough, it can fire the actors up to paradise.
Then he looked a bit forlorn and said, ‘I’m not sure if the health and safety man will let it happen.’ He’s already learning the pragmatism of a producer.
by Cat Rosario
I met Carrie at the Wilderness festival last summer, after I accidentally dropped my bra by her tent on the way to the showers in the dark. She heard me prowling round it and thought I was nicking her tent pegs. She is an actress and an incessant storyteller, and I am a writer, and we were both frustrated at being at the whim of theatres. So we decided a few months ago to set up our own theatre company, and call it Pure Fluke. We wanted to create theatre that playfully remixed classic texts but didn’t take itself too seriously. And we really wanted to do a romcom. But the question was how to produce a play with the summer holidays looming and our eleven-year-old sons needing entertainment? Then we hit on a great solution: get them doing some of the hard graft, and give them the odd tube of wine gums as payment. They have learnt so much about set design, props and promotions, and brought the fresh, startling perspective that kids have.
The inspiration for our play Abandon, which was shown earlier this autumn, came from a fascination with internet dating. How this is a completely new courtship ritual where the rules of engagement are deeply confused with both heart-breaking and hilarious results. As well as enduring love affairs. Whoever we talked to had their own - or a ‘friend’s’ - internet dating nightmare story. One that stands out for sheer surrealism is a friend who hit it off so much with a man she met on the internet that on their first date they ended up back at his house. In the morning he was a little cool, and so she headed off in a huff. A few hours later she got a furious text, accusing her of stealing one of his garden gnomes. No protestations from her would convince him, and he launched a month-long campaign of online stalking, demanding his gnome back.
But there was another story we found so compelling – of a woman’s apparently perfect online revenge against a man who had left her, and who she still loved - that it became the seed for our play Abandon. I can’t say what it as that would give it away. But it doesn’t involve gnomes.
At the time I was reading a children’s version of Dante’s Inferno to my son, Ebi, and I realised that this medieval, macabre poem about Hell offered a perfect new lens through which to look at contemporary internet dating. The Inferno begins with Dante lost in a dark forest. He is thirty-five years old and doesn’t know how to live any more. So he sets off on a road trip – over a long weekend - deep into the centre of the earth where hell lurks. There he sees displayed all the sins of the flesh. And by the end, it’s such a relief to get out of this freezing hell and get back to the earth’s surface and see the purity of the stars.
So our play begins in the dark forest of internet dating, where these struggles between instantly gratifying every desire or having some kind of moral integrity are played out pretty much every time someone picks up a mouse. We are all Dantes, in the pathless forest, having to choose how to act - and then live with, or try to evade, the consequences. Our heroines in the forest, are two Irish sisters living in Peckham, one of whom is herself a single mother with a difficult teenage daughter, who meets a much younger man online. Being mother ourselves gives us so much material …
Technical issues have given us the greatest challenges. We were badly let down by a man who was going to get us a wind machine. My son suggested that instead we should build a Leonardo Da Vince style machine, which we can wire all the audience up to, and when they peddle we get wind. Perhaps even have a line of discreetly hidden cannons and when they peddle hard enough, it can fire the actors up to paradise.
Then he looked a bit forlorn and said, ‘I’m not sure if the health and safety man will let it happen.’ He’s already learning the pragmatism of a producer.
