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What do you research and why did you want to create a piece of theatre from it?
I work broadly on the history of witchcraft, magic, ghosts, popular medicine, and the supernatural over the last few hundred years. This has included exploring urban and rural fortune-tellers and their clients, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I began to refocus my attention on the popularity of fortune-tellers during the First World War due to be being involved in running the University’s Everyday Lives in War Engagement Centre. I was interested in the opportunity to create a piece of theatre out of this research for two reasons. First, I had already worked with the theatre company Out of Joint to inform the creation of a play about Jane Wenham, of Hertfordshire, who, in 1712, was the last person to be found guilty of witchcraft in England. I had much enjoyed working with the actors, playwright, and director, so I thought working with Cap-a-Pie would be an equally stimulating and enjoyable creative opportunity. And it has been.

What excited you most about The Important Man and what were the challenges?
The world of fortune-tellers and prophets during the First World War is full of potential for drama and comedy, and I hoped that the depiction of this unusual facet of everyday life on the Home Front in the form of a play, would better bring home to people the complex relationship between anxiety and faith in a time of war. The play also explores interesting ideas around the boundaries between science and the supernatural, at a time when spiritualism was popular, and electricity was still a novel force for many people. As the historical advisor, I guess the main challenge was to identify the sort of source materials and objects that might give Cap-a-Pie a real feel for the period and the diverse characters who operated as fortune tellers and prophets. Just giving a load of academic books and articles to a creative team whose time is limited, who need to work fast and intensively to generate narrative and dialogue that give a genuine feel for time and place, is not particularly helpful.

Has creating the show made you think any differently about your research?
Yes, in several ways. I consider writing history as a creative exercise in blending narrative, analysis, and illustrative examples. Working with Cap-a-Pie made me think about how the process of writing for a different medium, a play, can inform the way I approach writing history for a general reader. Every time I was working with Cap-a-Pie we were thinking about the audience and how you can tell a complex story as simply as possible. That is a really valuable exercise. The questions the Cap-a-Pie team asked about the personality and motive of the characters in the play also made me reflect on how I understand the real people that inspired the fictional creations. I am always learning from other disciplines and people with different approaches to presenting history.

We created The Important Man over several stages. The first was an initial research and development period. We created a lot of material, stories and characters and figured out the world of the play. Out of that period came a 15 minute piece of theatre.

The second stage was a more concentrated period of time and was where we really fleshed out the story. We used lots of improvisation and then shaped the story and the script as we went along.

The third stage was about making tweaks and changes to the show, strengthening the story, shaping the play into a final draft.

We were incredibly lucky to work with Professor Owen Davies from the University of Hertfordshire, who is an expert in magic and fortune-telling. Owen was present throughout this process, from initial conversations about the kind of material we were interested in, to him watching sections of the show and giving feedback, advice and ideas related to the historical content. He was also incredibly helpful for simply checking facts to maintain the accuracy and authenticity of the piece. And having someone so knowledgeable in the rehearsal room means it’s a very efficient way of working.

Myself and Katy at Cap-a-Pie were very pleased to be joined by a brilliant creative team to create The Important Man. Director Laura Lindow is a very experienced director, deviser, writer and performer. She has a fantastic sense of what makes a strong story and what audiences want from characters. Designer Imogen Cloët created a visually striking set that was easy to tour with. She works in a very detailed way which really suited the piece.

I’ll be performing The Important Man this autumn. Find out more here.

This year Durham University’s Department of Archaeology is working with a local theatre company Cap-a-Pie to create a new show – Woven Bones. The show is based on the story of Scottish soldiers who were taken prisoner after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650.

The Scottish soldiers project grew from a discovery of human remains during construction work on Durham’s UNESCO World Heritage Site. The remains of 28 young men were found in two mass graves at Durham University’s Palace Green Library. Painstaking excavation and analysis revealed that they were some of more than 1600 men who died in captivity after the Civil War Battle of Dunbar in September 1650.

These were ordinary people who had been caught up in extraordinary events. Many would have been recent recruits to the Scottish army, young men taken from day-to-day life to fight invading Parliamentary forces. Their first experience of battle was a disastrous defeat. Lasting under an hour, the Battle of Dunbar was one of the most brutal, bloody and short battles of the 17th Century civil wars.

Reports from the time suggest that anything between 300-5,000 soldiers died at the battle with a further 6,000 captured. It is thought that 1,000 sick and wounded soldiers were released, while approximately 4,000 endured an eight-day forced march to Durham, where they were imprisoned in the then-disused Cathedral church. Many died of malnutrition, disease and cold whilst in Durham. Their bodies were buried, hastily and without ceremony, in an obscure corner nearby.

This was the story of those men whose remains we found in November 2013. But the Scottish Soldiers Archaeology Project Team has found out much more about the people who had died at Durham and about their fellow prisoners who survived. Some of those men were sent far from home; 150 Scots went to New England as indentured servants. After seven years of working in the woods and ironworks of Massachusetts and Maine, they were free to make new lives in a new world.

One chaotic and terrifying hour of battle changed the lives of thousands. The road from Dunbar led some to unmarked graves in Durham and others to lives on the edge of the known world.

Talks, news reports and interviews undertaken by the Durham University research team have drawn strong reactions to this extraordinary story. The chance to tell it in a different way, to put a very direct and very human interpretation on the research results, is why the team were keen to work with Cap-a-Pie. Thousands of prisoners, five archaeologists, three actors; one fascinating story.

Cap-a-Pie will present Laura Lindow’s play Woven Bones at venues between Dunbar and Durham in June and July. After each performance members of the archaeology team will be taking part in a post-show discussion and Q&A. We hope to meet you at one of the performances.

On a drizzly Tuesday afternoon the Cap-a-Pie team took the train to Durham. Welcomed into Durham University’s Department of Archaeology we were given an incredible opportunity: a full tour of the human bioarchaeology laboratory and the chance to lay out a skeleton of our own in the pattern of the identification process of the Scottish Soldiers. These weren’t the skeletons of the Scottish Soldiers but others who are part of other research projects being conducted at Durham University. The visit was so we could better understand the archaeology and the science behind the story of the Scottish Soldiers.

We entered the room to find the dry yellow bones/bone fragments laid out with care across the benches. The room was warm and bright, busy but neat. I was reminded of the much loved plastic skeleton in the Biology department at school (Bob) who used to disappear and reappear in ever more unlikely places (the locker room / the roof / the garden) but that complete and anatomically precise cast didn’t come close to the weathered shards on the cushioned table top.

I’m not a squeamish person, I’m reasonably robust about the ins and outs of the body, and there was nothing gory in what we were looking at. But it was somewhere after the cast of the newborn baby skeleton and just before the detailed discussion of the way abscesses burrow through the jaw bone that my vision began to dim and a gradual, persistent wave of nausea started to build in my body. I realised I was on the verge of passing out and had to sit down with my head between my legs.

For me this was the most surprising thing of the afternoon: the instinctual connection I felt with the bodies (because that’s how I realised I was thinking of them, as bodies not skeletons specifically) and my own sudden awareness of the very real writing of injury, disease and poverty on the human body. Lives so hard and so brief that the pain is written into the skeleton itself.

And that’s what we need to capture in the design: an appropriate and respectful language which can speak not just about the short painful lives of the soldiers themselves, but also about the emotional impact of the dig; reading the story of these men and boys from their final remains. The archaeologists at Durham University are deeply respectful in their work, extending to a firmly worded sign on the door reminding students of the respect due to human remains. It is incredibly moving to see the curved leg bone of a child with rickets, the deep painful cavity a young man had to live with, or the spongey bone texture of a weak and malnourished body: there is so much story in the skeleton alone.

Last week we concluded our first two weeks in the rehearsal room for our brand new production ‘Woven Bones’.  We spent the fortnight devising with three actors and writer Laura Lindow, around the stories of the Scottish prisoners of war from the 17th century Battle of Dunbar whose bones were found buried in Durham in 2013.  On hand to help were also academics from Durham University’s Department of Archaeology who conducted the analysis of the skeletons and uncovered their stories.

We’ve worked with academics many times in the past and there are two things that really stand out for me about working in this way:

1. Having such specific expertise plugged into the work in real-time.  After we show a researcher something we’ve made or complete an improvisation, they can suggest tweaks to better align the theatre with the research which in turn can have incredibly useful outcomes for character and story.

The process here was slightly different in that the Scottish Soldiers Archaeology Project has a small team of researchers attached to it so we were visited by four academics during our time in the rehearsal room, as opposed to just one in previous projects.  Each had their own specific knowledge and were never without some kind of considered and knowledgeable answer to our myriad questions.

I said to the actors at one point that if they were able to pose a question to a researcher that didn’t elicit a response then I would give them £10.

I am yet to pay anything out.

2. You are opened up to worlds that you didn’t know much or anything about.  Things that help feed you creatively but are also just interesting and useful to know about.  What struck me most about this aspect in this project is that there seemed to be a palpable sense of interest and enthusiasm coming to us about the work that we do.  That is, the researchers themselves, who had little knowledge about making theatre, were fascinated about how we work.

Having such a clear and democratic exchange of expertise was really heartening and bodes well for the rest of the process.

Whenever we perform our show ‘The Town Meeting’ we get a good amount of people back for the post-show discussion.  After being involved in an 80 minute immersive show where the stakes are high and emotions can be fraught, we feel like people want to process what has just happened to them.

But after that discussion was over, we had no idea what happened to that energy that was created and whether the show had any lasting residue in the community.

But in the past couple of weeks, we were able to answer that question.

Northern Heartlands (one of 16 Great Place Schemes running across England with funding from HLF & ACE whose aim is to put arts and culture at the heart of their communities) invited us to the village of Startforth in Teesdale to perform ‘The Town Meeting’ one day and on another day run a workshop around planning, community and place.

What was unique about Startforth is that they were on the cusp of developing their Neighbourhood Plan – a potentially daunting and time-consuming process with real-world consequences for the village.  The hope was that this two-pronged approach would allow the community to look at the creation of the Plan more holistically and creatively.

We did wonder about the compatibility of having the fictional show one week and then changing gear for the workshop the next but the production not only allowed the community to become familiar with us but it allowed them to take a step back from the real issues affecting their community and reflect on what was important to them.

Dr Paul Cowie of Newcastle University who co-created ‘the Town Meeting’ and helped to plan and lead the workshop said:

“The workshop was a more constructive process which helped the community think about the vision for the neighbourhood plan and perhaps about the challenges they face along the way. It was great to see so many people turn out for both both events and tackle them with energy and enthusiasm.”

Jill Cole, the Director of Northern Heartlands was very pleased with how the two strands of the project came together:

“‘The Town Meeting’ and following workshop proved to be excellent vehicles for engaging the community, provoking discussion and getting people to think about some of the wider issues they face in their locality in a fun and inspiring way.”

Completing this work provoked us to think about an even bigger question that could be answered sometime in the future:  if planners, artists and communities could work together over a bigger project, what might that look like?