New Model Theatre – Static

Ahead of the performance at INCOMING Festival, I caught up with New Model Theatre’s Artistic Director, Tom Nicholas, to hear a little more about the company and what audiences can expect from its performance of Static.

Nicholas is the common denominator between the collection of artists who intermittently collaborate as part of New Model Theatre Company. He describes the company as, “me… and then associated others… People pop in on various shows and as we’ve moved forward we’ve gathered people who we regularly collaborate with. It’s been quite a natural process.”

Static was New Model’s first show, and the story of the development of the text seems to be just as fluid as that of the company itself, in the way that it’s moved from space to space, changing cast and picking up a creative team and artistic support as it goes. “I originally started writing it probably two years ago now,” Nicholas explains. “It was just a bit of text, and then Hugh [McCann] and I were able to develop it with help from the Barbican Theatre in Plymouth. It was great to have the support to really get stuck in with it. It changed quite a bit – it was originally probably overly serious, and then too overly humourous at points, but now what I think we have is an entertaining piece that still has something to say”.

I ask Nicholas a little more about the company’s history and he tells me about the work in between the original Static and its subsequent revival. “April was our second show. That was a collaboration with [writer] Emily Hollyoak. It was a two-hander, and it’s a love story I guess”. The first performance of April was in a coffee shop in Exeter – a demonstration of how, for Nicholas, it seems that lack of a fancy venue should never be a barrier to making the work that you want to make. “We found a coffee shop that had a room… It really can be that simple sometimes!”

And New Model’s initiative paid off as, after seeing the first run, April was picked up and programmed as a part of a festival at The Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter. Nicholas describes how the success of April instilled a desire to “hit the ground running,” which it appears could be something of a mantra for the company in general, as it seems to sum up much of their “go get ’em” ethos and attitude to making theatre.

I admire Nicholas’s approach to producing work; it seems that if he wants to make a show, then he finds a way to make a show. I ask him about his decision to stay in Plymouth and not train at a drama school. “I just didn’t feel that that was the right way for me,” he says, and explains how he developed his love for theatre through growing up as a member of the Young Company at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth. The Young Company seems to be the connection between Nicholas and many of New Model’s collaborators, and Nicholas tells me how, as a youth theatre company, “we had a real ‘working mentality’. We all left just thinking ‘we’re going to do this’.”

After making the decision to stay in Plymouth, he tells me how, “I took on a lot of assistant director jobs in Exeter and Plymouth, and explored doing a bit of writing; I had some short plays produced, or sometimes I’d offer to run the lights for a show, just to be involved! It was a good idea to take that time to discover what it was exactly that I wanted to do and I think it was the ‘hands-on’ approach that allowed me to develop such a love for that kind of work. Then I decided that it was time for me to start something up myself and just see where it took me,” and it was at this point that Nicholas began writing Static.“It was around late 2010 to 2011 when there were a lot of student protests in the news, as well as coverage of the ‘Occupy’ movement; I wanted to write a piece about how people get to that level of activism and what it is that tips them over the edge.”

What Nicholas wrote, and developed with McCann and The Barbican, Plymouth, “ended up being a coming of age story about a young chap growing up at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and how big world events could affect his life on a personal scale.” The piece references large  news events that the main character then connects to his own personal circumstances; “he gets punched in the face on the way home from school on the same day as the London 7/7 attacks and although there isn’t an actual connection he sees a parallel between the two as unexpected violent attacks.”

The play uses a mixture of written text and verbatim, which Nicholas plucked from various news sources during his research and writing process. “I wanted to take these bits of text that get written and then only used for a day before they’re thrown away.” The piece features verbatim text from, amongst others, a speech from an army general in Iraq and a banker on the cusp of the break of the financial crisis. Nicholas describes how, “there was just something theatrically interesting about them, either in the way they were written or in the way we could play against them”. As the piece explores a young man’s youth, as “seen through screens”, the live action is intertwined with video interaction. “I wanted to show how constant information through rolling news and the Internet impacts on the process of growing up and, in this character’s case, tips him to the point of activism.”

New Model Theatre is looking forward to its performance at INCOMING, and in particular the chance to “perform under the A Younger Theatre Brand – they’re such a supportive unit for so many young theatre companies.” No stranger to the fringe festival scene, having taken work recently to the Edinburgh, Manchester and Camden fringe festivals, Nicholas describes how the anticipatory feeling around INCOMING is somehow different. “It feels like a real celebration of the emerging fringe scene artists. Maybe it’s partly because it’s a curated festival, but it feels less competitive. Although there is a lot of warmth at other fringe festivals, I think that everyone has this kind of in-built competitiveness. But with INCOMING there seems to be much less of that. It’s much more of a celebration. I’m really looking forward to it, to meeting the other companies – some of which I know, because I’ve met them before, or some because I know them by reputation – it’s really nice to meet people face to face when you’ve already heard about their work. INCOMING feels like a big deal to us and it’ll be nice to take that back with us to Plymouth to continue with what we do there”.

Static plays on the opening night of INCOMING festival on Monday 19 May at the New Diorama Theatre. For more information and tickets, visit NDT’s website.