Features Published 14 July 2015

Alan Lane: “We have an Army”

Alan Lane, artistic director of Slung Low, talks guns, tanks, and adapting the story of Camelot for a Sheffield-wide stage.
Alex Chisholm

The phone crackles into life. Faint among the static, is the voice of Alan Lane, director of Slung Low and also of the production of Camelot the company are making with Sheffield People’s Theatre, part of Sheffield Theatres. Ok, it isn’t an actual warzone he’s calling from, but with a couple of hours to go before the new show opens, with a cast of 150, and 680 people about to turn up to experience the first night, it is all hands to battle stations.

Camelot is a contemporary retelling of King Arthur myths, written by Slung Low regular James Phillips (the writer of last year’s spectacular White Whale) and realised by the core Slung Low team. In addition to Alan as director, it includes David Farley, designer, Lucy Hind, movement, Matt Angove sound designer and Heather Fenoughty, composer. So what drew them to King Arthur?

Alan Lane explains that “Slung Low are on a current track of looking at classic stories in a contemporary way. The reason why we chose King Arthur at this time is: the question about what it means to be English is a really big question. I was struck by [the way that when we were planning this] the Scottish referendum was on. And then on Saturday there was huge EDL march right the way through our stage. We had to clear our set, and when we put it back we realized we were dressing the set in an almost classic way for an EDL march. These questions of what it is to be English, what it is to be the national team, part of the nation are really pressing and me and James Phillips were really keen to explore that.”

The script started in Phillips’ imagination with an image of a girl on the swing. A general enters, followed by soldiers, and that’s the start of the play. This evolved through research and discussion into the script they have now. The process was pretty much a traditional, even “old-fashioned” one according to Lane. The difference is the setting out in Sheffield’s streets: “a production in the real world which is really satisfying for us and for David Farley our designer, batting ideas back and forth. [it] isn’t so much having any effect on the writing process but more that James is aware of what is possible as he’s writing.”

Even if the writing process might be traditional, the look and feel of their shows are not – though they’re arguably much more traditional when viewed within the Ancient Greek or Medieval pageant tradition of performance. What makes them different?

“For us the making of theatre is an active verb – we’ll go buy the Land Rover and we’ll buy and paint the scenery ourselves. We’re at our best when we’ve got these big staging issues to solve: like now, when we’re staging a battle with 120 people. We’re a gang resolving problems. The actual, literal making of theatre is very important to us.”

This collective approach and their shared history allows for a flexible way of working. When dramaturgical questions come up, discussion is shared between the gang, as each understands how the show works from the inside. It is a close but not closed off relationship. Sheffield Theatre’s stage management team have locked in to Slung Low “like a command module”. It has allowed them “to welcome 150 strong People’s Theatre into our gang or us into them, depending on which way you look at it. We have an army for a few weeks and that’s very exciting.”

Asked what makes a Slung Low show, Lane comes up with three characteristics: New writing (for the last 10 years they have almost entirely being doing plays by new writers), use of headphones which allows a kind of cinematic sound and intimacy of voice, and work produced in non-theatre spaces. All of these three things add up to:

“Real things in Real space – when James writes ‘Queen enters on a Land Rover’ I don’t think ‘How am I going to make a Land Rover’, I think ‘Where am I going to get a Land Rover from?’ Where in Sheffield is there space enough so that I can drive a Land Rover with a Queen on top through an audience of 600 people?”

The overall effect is a little bit like being on a film set: or, actually being inside a film watching it happen around you. This is clearly as much fun for the team as it is for the audiences.

“We like things – things are very exciting.” Apparently, the next show is going to involve speedboats, which means learning to drive them: ‘there are solutions to having a speedboat that don’t involve the designer and director driving it around but they are less fun for us.”

Slung Low was one of the early pioneers and innovators in headphone shows, where the audience are given ear pieces which mix the actors’ voices into a film-style soundtrack with music, as well as drowning out any incidental street noise. It’s been developing and expanding the model from one person or small group shows to the larger scale WWI chocolate factory piece Blood + Chocolate in York or The White Whale at Leeds Dock. Not that the more intimate work is any less valuable but with Camelot they are demonstrating how, with the right technology and knowledge, headphone shows can be done outdoors, and on a giant scale. It isn’t just in the form of their work that they have been innovative but in their relationship with their audiences.

“We take up space in the world and we invite people to come stare at us doing it. Which people clearly are happy to do, judging by home-made trailer for the show that appeared on YouTube, or indeed by how fast tickets are selling.

Things that are paid for by the people belong to the people, and any barrier to them doing that is wrong and should be knocked down as quickly as possible. People should run to the theatre in the hope of seeing something wild and reckless not trudge on the way in the hope they might see something good for them.”

Camelot in rehearsals

Camelot in rehearsals

This attitude runs through everything they do, whether that’s Pay What You Decide, cheap beer at the Hub, or the fact that they cook for you or give you food from their the allotment: Slung Low are people that you want to spend time with. Lane is clear making theatre vital, making it what people want ,and what they can afford, to see isn’t a choice: it is essential for survival.

“We’re in danger of chasing away the people who are most likely to defend us — it’s not Arts Council or DCMS. The people who are most likely to defend us, if we do it right, are the people themselves.”

This makes the combination between Slun Llow and Sheffield People’s Theatre a beautiful fit. SPT is described as the intergenerational theatre company of Sheffield Theatres. Made up of the people of Sheffield aged 12+ it has been part of a number of productions, including the 94-strong Sheffield Mysteries last year, another modern retelling of a Medieval story. Lane is very passionate that they are not there to learn or as clients but as fellow artists. It is their time, their efforts which is worth thousands to the production.

“They are philanthropists- they are giving the resources that allow the production to happen. That puts them in the driving seat. They have to be brilliant otherwise we wouldn’t make the show. In different ways the idiosyncrasies of their brilliance has shifted the production, the actual script.”

In one example the opening scene of the play is in French. It wasn’t written in French, wasn’t intended to be in French but it is better that way, and it came about because one of SPT performers is French.

“As a gang we are a cohesive unit. It’s a very dangerous show: Large vehicles, explosions, swords, live guns and more smoke canisters than you can count and that all 150 are going out. We’re going to look after each other and come back is a really exciting feeling.”

For Lane and Slunglow this inclusive, collective style is just about making good theatre. It doesn’t matter if the show has three people in a black box studio or 150 in the open air. Every person has to understand it and feel ownership of it. Good theatre responds to the skills, abilities and personalities of all the people who are part of it.

It’s time to release Alan Lane back to his gang, to making Camelot live once more in Sheffield City centre. It isn’t exactly a secret that Alan’s father was in military intelligence. It isn’t difficult to see how he and his company are following in his father’s footsteps: both jobs need intelligence, teamwork, leadership, a certain amount of subterfuge and a delight occasionally in blowing the bloody doors off. Slung Low are a gang, a unit, a crack command troop. In fact, they are that thing that many claim to be, but few are. They are a company.

Camelot: The Shining City runs from the 9th-18th July: you can buy tickets here.

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Alex Chisholm

ALEX CHISHOLM is a director, dramaturg and Co-Artistic Director with Aisha Khan of Freedom Studios in Bradford. As a freelance director, productions include Nine Lives by Zodwa Nyoni, and Consciencious by Adam Z. Robinson. Alex was appointed Literary Manager at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in December 2001 and Associate Director in January 2006. Productions for West Yorkshire Playhouse include Schoolboy/Lover by Richard Cameron, Dust a community play by Kenneth Yates, Mela by Tajinder Singh Hayer, Scuffer and Sunbeam Terrace by Mark Catley, Tender Dearly and Non-Contact Time by Jodie Marshall, Huddersfield by Ugljesa Sajtinac, English version by Chris Thorpe, and two radio programmes in co-production with the BBC: Night Lights and Writing the City. In January 2005 she was invited by Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade to direct the Serbian Premiere of Huddersfield which ran for over 10 years. She is a (very) occasional writer and still exhausted mother of three.

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