By The Horns - a creative partnership

My names is J.J McColl and I am an actor and theatre maker based in Plymouth with an interest in Community Theatre and collaboration. I was approach by Karen Pilkington to produce a small piece of engaging theatre, targeted at members of the community and families attending Summer Fairs and end of school year parties. The theme of the project was exciting and posed a very simple challenge ‘How do you discover a sense of belonging and pride in an area of Plymouth that has a bad reputation?’.

I read through the reading material from interviews with local residents and from this gathered several different topics of conversation- Transportation, NHS services and the dangers of shunning young people from the community. From this I developed 4 characters and a hybrid storytelling set-up, a mix between escape room and immersive theatre involving audience members listening out for codes characters mention to unlock boxes so that progress the story. 

A stand out success of my end of the project was finding the sense of familiarity and community in areas like Bare Barton and St Beaux and opposed to areas like Plympton. I am from Plympton and noticed that the main difference between passengers boarding the (real world 21/A) bus in Plympton and those boarding at the other end of the journey in BB and StB was the ‘chat’. People actually talked to each other, even if they didn’t know each other, they weren’t afraid to talk. My character bus driver, ‘Daz’ refers to this in his opening speech to the passengers. Talk to each other to try and figure out the codes and all audiences did, even though they might not have known each other when they go on our ‘bus’ to watch. 

To conclude, I had a brilliant time working with this team and understand that we captured a larger audience than we expected. The power of storytelling is evident and finding yourself in your a story about your home/ land is palpable, it gives you a sense of identity and being heard, the good and the bad.