Production Notes for Peapickers

Welcome to Peapickers by Nicola Werenowska.

I first met Nicky at an Arts Council East Escalator project for developing writers in the region held at the Arvon Centre at Lumb Bank near Hebden Bridge where Ted Hughes had lived for a time. It was a wonderful location deep in the hills of Yorkshire, allowing space and time for reflection and writing. I was up there to talk about Eastern Angles, to meet the other writers (I had recommended three for the project) and to hear the pieces they had produced by the last day of the week. The writers presented a complete mixture of styles and forms and it was an absorbing process.

I talked about the Eastern Angles commissioning process and the kind of subjects we had tackled in the past, and our eagerness to explore forgotten areas of experience as they relate to our region. Nicky, who had been involved in a Colchester writers' group, approached me there and then and said her family was from Coggeshall and that she’d never thought about writing from such close sources but was interested in investigating this territory. We agreed to keep in touch and she duly sent me an idea set against the background of the local pea-picking stories she had heard from her mother and grandmother. I encouraged her to plan and develop the idea.

Nicky was keen to get stuck in straightaway and I had to restrain her from immediately starting writing. The irony of these situations where you are trying to help someone write is that you spend long periods disallowing them from writing. We had long sessions over scenarios and characters, on the period and how it would relate to now, and on the ramifications of genetics in our lives, as well as exploring what is possible on a touring stage. All of this was worked out before Nicky was allowed to go away and write it. To cut a long story short, we had rough draft about a year later, some of which was workshopped and read at last year's Pulse festival under the banner of Lumb Bank to Pulse. Due to my commitments for The Anatomist, which was about to go into rehearsal, I asked Sam Potter, who had assisted me a few years ago on In The Bleak Midwinter and who was now a staff director at the National Theatre, to direct this reading. Sam then stayed with the project and together we have helped Nicky - including giving her another actor to play with - develop the play even further.

The whole process has taken nearly two years, is dependent upon interaction between various theatres (the Mercury Theatre Colchester suggested Nicky for the Arts Council project, Colchester Arts Centre organised the project, and Sam was part of the mentoring scheme of the National Theatre for young directors), all funded by the Arts Council. In addition it’s about funding structures that allow Eastern Angles to access lottery money to commission new plays with sufficient lead-in time to work with writers and then plan in the right scale of production and this region's own ambitions for developing new talent through its Escalator project. So at this time of the Arts Debate, which the Arts Council is running on its website, it’s worth remembering how public subsidy allows work to be created, let alone produced and toured. This tour is visiting some 42 different venues, most in the heart of rural communities for whom this will be the sole occasion that Arts Council money reaches their village, taking a new play to audiences that have already shown that they are keen to see and hear new work by supporting the work of Eastern Angles for 25 years, and finally and not least, it’s also about inspiring writers to look on their own doorstep and find experience that can talk to audiences. If you want to register your own views, log on and take part in the debate at www.artsdebate.co.uk

Ivan Cutting

Artistic Director