Recently we donated £800 to the Woodland Trust the UK-based charity that works to safeguard, restore and create woodlands across the country. To do it we collected 50p from the fees of every new joiner to the company last year. As we said when we announced the news it’s not only nurturing young talent in the performing arts, we’re also trying to do the same for the planet for future generations. We’ll continue this in the future.
Well, that’s enough bigging ourselves up, but I have a soft spot for the Woodland Trust. In 2003, they gave us a £500 grant to create a performance in Hainault Forest in Essex. You might think how on earth do you create a story about trees? And you’d be right because on the face of it what have human beings got in common with trees? Seemingly not a lot. But we decided that one important connection was life cycle – trees might live a lot longer but they are “born”, grow and develop, endure storms and droughts and hopefully reach old age before one day they fall.
We decided to create a story about a baby born into the world, toddling, going to school, becoming a teenager, meeting a partner, getting married, having children, passing middle age, and having grandchildren before passing on. I’ve always enjoyed getting the cast to come up with ideas for the story, and this was no exception. We improvised a lot of different ideas before we gradually settled on a plot that centred on a young girl. We decided that cases could be a useful prop as we could use them in different ways in the story and they suggested travel and rites of passage. They were also useful because they could be carried with us as we were also taking the play to a young people’s theatre festival near Graz in Austria. We used some of the money to hire some period cases and costumes.
The resulting play was successful I think mainly because following the story of someone from babyhood brings you close to them and you can’t help caring about what happens to them as they go through life. Our first performance was for a group of young kids in the forest. I think they were expecting a bit of fun for 20 minutes or so but bless them they ended up watching an hour-long play.
The later performance in Austria was beautiful. The sun gradually set as the play proceeded and that gave another sense of journey. The actors subtly touched the trees in moments of change in their lives so I think we managed to make a strong connection between us and trees – in fact, that was the name of the play. And a lovely thing is that Erin who played that central character and Gemma who played her daughter are now mothers with children of their own and together run Waltham Forest Theatretrain.
