(Rugged coastline and urban living side-by-side: the coastal view at Ilfracombe, North Devon)
Leaping across landscapes and racing through eras from 1475 to 2075, Hefted goes on an extraordinary journey through North Devon. From Dolton in 1780 you’ll come to the Tarka Line in 1861, via the walking wind turbines in Bradworthy in 2005 and onto an imagined future at Lundy Island.
Inspired by conversations and interviews with people across North Devon, this new play explores the connection we have to our land, the pull it has on our past and what it means for our future.
There’s a new community cast from across the generations in Swimbridge, music and sound created live on stage by the performers, the magic of 600 years of North Devon myth and history in nine scenes, and the openness, talent and experience of the region’s own Multi Story Theatre at the helm.
From the outset of the first creative planning meeting and on into very the first rehearsal for this December’s premiere of Hefted – produced by Beaford Arts and Swimbridge Jubilee Hall – we could feel the room brimming with theatrical possibilities.
Hefted tells an epic story of humankind’s intimate and transformational relationship to the earth beneath its feet in this unique UNESCO Biosphere landscape.
Audiences are going to see a play closely connected to this joint professional and community cast, who hail from the region itself, and it’s going to be thrilling to watch as they feed their own personal experiences into the characters of the story.
Bill Buffery and Gill Nathanson of Multi Story and I chatted excitedly about the talented child actors in Swimbridge who were raring to get their teeth into the script, and were delighted to find that even in early auditions the local cast were finding humour and depth of meaning in the writing.
(From R-L: Gill Nathanson, Bill Buffery and professional performer Ben Stretton in first read-through)
We realised quickly how much we wanted the community cast to explore and delve into the ensemble of Hefted, uncovering their own unique characters to help frame the whole production.
So much is still undecided at this stage, and that’s incredibly exciting. We have a newly-minted script that’s rehearsal ready but want to explore staging ideas with this completely new company of professional and community performers.
There’s space in the script for movement, song and sound, and as they’ve never worked together before, we want to see where they take things – and to build a fantastic collective of artists along the way.
We want to understand what fits best with how they see the play.
There’s a huge thrill and risk in that, looking on as the writer and knowing that you can now share the ownership and be surprised, delighted and challenged.
At the heart of this project was an idea for a script that could be interpreted in different ways by different theatre companies, but where the stories would always speak to a North Devon audience about the magic and dynamism of the landscape in which they live.
This Swimbridge production will be completely unique to this new company, but will be the first, we hope, of many different versions of Hefted when the script goes open-source for amateur production from next year.
I went along to pass the script over at the first rehearsal, leaving the company to begin their unique exploration of this very local play with a global environmental vision.
It’s rare that you go to a first full company read-through of a script – especially with large-cast plays – and enter a room full of people who know each other, come from the same place and have immediate ownership over the rehearsal venue.
Most professionals will be slightly trepidatious, anxious to make a good first impression, scoping out who else is in the room and approaching things cautiously.
It was wonderful therefore to turn up at Swimbridge Jubilee Hall and find the room bustling, busy, and full of laughter and excitement.
The sense of this being a community venture is so strong. I look around the room and see six young actors under the age of eighteen, shoulder-to-shoulder with the professionals Laura James and Ben Stretton, and next to them the adults from Swimbridge whom clearly already know the young people, and community producer Julie Whitton.
Bill – who is at the helm as director – holds the space firmly and marks this production as a totally new page in the story of Hefted.
Some people here were involved with the play’s development when it was just a few ideas, some have seen readings of scripts and scenes along the way, but Bill’s message is clear: forget all of that.
This will be yours – ours – to invent and imagine around the words and bring to life in our own way.
He frames the play in poetic terms to get us thinking – it’s not a history play, but contains some history; it’s not a fairy-tale, but it contains some magic; it’s not a fantasy, but it contains the fantastical; its tones might be dark and savage in some places but are playful and full of lightness and comedy in others.
In addition, we might be six hundred years away from some of the characters’ timeframes, but their experiences of love, life, death, belonging, separation, heartbreak and adventure can still mirror our own.
The read-through is undertaken with gusto, commitment and bravery. The potential in the room is clear, from the passionate young actors through to the gravitas of age and experience in the older ones, and the atmospheres of intensity, conflict and concentration they are beginning to create with one another.
(Birds of prey in a clearing in woods near Dolton: a location inspiring one of the scenes)
We talk afterwards of the vivid images in the text, the conjuring up of the sense of diverse landscapes in North Devon and the characters we love and are curious to know more about – curiosities that will be unpacked in rehearsal as this cast takes ownership of the words and the spaces around them.
Only a day later photographs come through of the ensemble at work: stories told in images not words, a collective exploring its identity in the story, a theatrical language starting to emerge even at this early stage.
If you pass the Jubilee Hall on a weekday evening, be aware: something very special is beginning to take shape within those four walls.
Hefted will be on Friday 7th and Saturday 8th December at 7.30pm at Swimbridge Jubilee Hall.
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