Ten Takes on the Result and a play on the nature of consent at Hope Mill Theatre

Debbie Manley | 11th June 2017

Take Back Theatre: Grant Archer, Julie Hesmondhalgh and Rebekah Harrison. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.

THE nature of consent will be examined in a new multi-media event, My Version of Events, at Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester Tuesday 13 June – Saturday 17 June – with a different cast every night!

Established by Broadchurch and Coronation Street actress Julie Hesmondhalgh, writer Rebekah Harrison and filmmaker Grant Archer, Take Back Theatre recently won the Stagedoor Award for Excellence at the Manchester Theatre Awards.

My Version of Events at Hope Mill Theatre is different from their usual Ten Takes or Take Back events because it is running for five nights and is a single play, instead of a diverse selection of shorter pieces.

Rebekah, who has worked closely with both Manchester Rape Crisis and Trafford Rape Crisis to create the play, said: “They have read the script and were happy with it.

“That is really important for us. We recognize that there are people working with these issues everyday, who are working with vulnerable people, and understand those issues better than we do, and we want to present that in the right way.”

“It is a rehearsed reading so the actors are going to start in the morning with the director, go through the process of exploring the text and their responses to it, then perform in the evening, script in hand.

“The play talks about a rape trial and it tells the story of two young people involved in that trial. We have multimedia art installations to start that discussion. Alongside that we will have panel discussions every night”

She added: “I work in a domestic violence setting so I’m really passionate about having trigger warnings so people know what they are coming to.”

Take Back Theatre will also be staging Ten Takes on the Result on Monday 12 June, at Hope Mill Theatre, with immediate script-in-hand responses to the general election, which resulted in a hung parliament.

Take back Theatre presents Ten Takes on the Result on Monday 12 June at Hope Mill Theatre

Julie said: “We set up (Take Back Theatre) about 18 months ago when the Conservative party conference came to Manchester. We were outraged that they had come to Manchester, which is not traditionally a Conservative city, and we wanted to create an artistic response to that.

“It was Becx, who was the mastermind behind it and put together an evening at central Methodist Hall… We did that with a panel discussion afterwards about the role of theatre and art in politics. Grant came along to film it and people really loved it. We thought this is something we can do and utilise this energy.

“Many of the actors in Manchester are political beings, maybe not party political, but have a lot to say about the way the world is. We wanted to channel that energy into something positive rather than us all being behind out keyboards, slagging off the state of affairs on Facebook. So me, Grant and Rebekah decided to set something up more formally, which was the birth of Take Back.”

Grant met Rebekah when he photographed 24/7 Festival, where Rebekah had a play on. Meanwhile Rebekah met Julie at an anti-austerity event in London…

Julie said: “We ended up backstage with Russell Brand and Jeremy Corbyn. But we had been Facebook friends before that. We knew each other from a distance really. So we were thrown together and it has worked out brilliantly because we work really, really well together and we have very particular skill sets.

“We have two branches to our work now. The first branch is our traditional Takes model… Ten Takes on Hope because it felt like things were moving in a different direction. Ten Takes on Capital, after the budget. Then Brexit happened so we did Take Back Togetherness, which was a massive undertaking at the Royal Exchange, the Sunday after Brexit.

“We put an emergency call out to writers, really big names like Russell T Davies (Queer As Folk, Dr Who and Cucumber), and the Royal Exchange gave us their list of writers. It is all script in hand so we did this mammoth three and a half hours, with songs and poetry.

“The idea was to bring people back together because people felt so devastated by that result, disenfranchised and separate from people. About the same time we started to go off in a different direction with some other work, which is more installation and immersive.”

Grant said: “We had been supporting the refugee camps in Calais and Dunkirk. Working in the warehouses there, getting lots of donations and we had bought a van. We were contacted by the Royal Exchange to do their React project and given their studio space for a week.

“We were inspired by our experience of trying to volunteer and the response back here. We took people, one or two at a time through a space, where they interacted with authority, and the intimidation authorities could impose.

From there they created a performance in a derelict building that had been taken over by artists and at the Royal Exchange, as part of a massive project on birth, incorporating their own reflection on the refugee crisis in that.

Rebekah said: “We used a tent as a mini instillation and collected stories on birth in refugee camps. We asked local writers to write their responses to that data. “

The stories were recorded and played in the tent and a local artist embroidered the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child on baby clothes. That project has since moved on to Bolton and Chester.

However, Julie said they have no plans to take their work on tour or set up groups in other areas: “We’d really like people to be inspired and do their own version of what we do. We all do different jobs as well, so this is something we do in our spare time.

“What we’ve done is create an artistic community in Manchester of people who that really want to affect change through art and theatre, and culture. We have a core team that is expanding all the time. We’d love other cities to take that on.

“What is great about the Takes strand of what we do is that it is very immediate. It is a day’s rehearsal, so we can get very good actors, and it’s performed that evening. They don’t have to learn the lines because it is script in hand. It’s amazing what you can achieve in a day. But there is a lot leading up to it.

“We’ve enjoyed moving round the city. We did Take Back America at the Comedy Store, and the Contact (Theatre) was perfect for our last one, Take Back Our Bodies, which was all about gender identity, sexuality etc.

Grant said: “We are quite keen that it is a supportive environment. At Take Back Our Bodies, people were free to come and go, because we were talking about sensitive subjects.”

Since winning the Manchester Theatre Award, their audience has been growing.

Julie said: “I feel like Bodies had a new audience. I don’t know if that was down to the award or the subject matter because gender politics naturally brings in a different crowd from capital and the way our country is run. But we did notice a big spike in people that we didn’t know.

“One criticism could be that we are preaching to the converted and that we have an audience that is liberal, at the very least, and are coming to agree with what we say. We are not going out into communities and doing that grass root work.

“But what we want to do is embolden people… The discussion that happens after one of our shows is one of the best things about it all, and there are always things that people don’t know about.

“In Bodies we had stories about gay genocide in Chechnya and disabled people telling their own stories… and a piece on fat-shaming.

“We try to represent everybody. There’s a lot of theatre in Manchester that claims to be representative and it is quite hard, you have to work a bit harder to find diverse cast and diverse creative teams.”

Rebekah said: “When we do the short pieces they have roughly an hour (to rehearse) and with Bodies some of the actors were in more than one piece.”

Grant added: “The tech run, if we have the luxury of a tech run, tends to finish five minutes before they open the door for people to come in. So it’s stressful but exciting. There’s a tradition of us all being violently ill the next day!”

To book tickets for Ten Takes on the Results on Monday 12 June and My Version of Events Tuesday 13 – Saturday 17 June visit hopemilltheatre.co.uk

Photographs of Take Back Our Bodies at the Contact Theatre by Elspeth Mary Moore.

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Manchester Theatre AwardTake Back Our Bodies poster.Take Back Our Bodies. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.Take Back Our Bodies. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.Take Back Our Bodies. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.Take Back Our Bodies. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.Take Back Our Bodies. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.Take Back Our Bodies. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.Take Back Our Bodies: Rupert Hill. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.Take Back Our Bodies. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.Take Back Our Bodies. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.Take Back Our Bodies. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.Take Back Our Bodies. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.Take Back Our Bodies. Photograph by Elspeth Mary Moore.Take Back America posterTen Takes on the Result on Monday 13 June at Hope Mill Theatre