Production Notes for The Anatomist

Welcome to The Anatomist

Eastern Angles started producing original work and touring it out to rural venues in East Anglia in 1982. As part of the Arts Council’s "Glory of the Garden" report the company expanded to include residency and larger spaces and in 1990  took its first production to London with an adaptation of Waterland that visited the Shaw Theatre for three weeks. However, this was only allowed under the wings of a commercial producer and generally our funding bodies frowned on the taking in of subsidised shows and even visiting the capital was excluded under national touring patterns.

Times have since changed and now the centre of gravity has shifted out to the Arts Council regional offices we are being encouraged to take work in and demonstrate the quality of work produced in the East of England. This also follows the Theatre Review of a few years ago when, amongst other major theatre companies in the regions, Eastern Angles was given a major uplift in funding. This allowed the company to sustain cast sizes and production standards, add a new summer production and find new spaces and audiences. So in recent years our national tour of David Copperfield visited Greenwich Playhouse and A Dulditch Angel visited Upstairs at the Gatehouse.

From the start Eastern Angles has done what it set out to do: to tour, to find extraordinary spaces and to explore hidden areas of experience in our East Anglian constituency. We have used documentary, adaptation and above all new writing, with regular commissions of writers in and out of the region, to achieve this. Of course writers, whether regional or not, also explore their own obsessions which naturally range across national and county boundaries and this year we have two remarkable examples: this new play by Tony Ramsay, The Anatomist, and an adaptation of Birds Without Wings, the best-selling novel by Louis de Bernières. Both writers in play and novel explore the wider world; in Tony’s case it is the production of Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica in Padua in the early sixteenth century and in Louis’ case, the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in the early twentieth century. However, both works were written in the region and offer fascinating challenges to us.

Tony Ramsay wrote The Bluethroat and Message From Neptune for our 1998 spring community and 1999 autumn residency tours respectively and they both proved popular with our audiences. The Bluethroat was subsequently produced as two linked plays on Radio 4. My normal practice is to limit any writer to two commissions. This is to allow us to find new voices for our programme and encourage them to find new markets for their work. But Tony then described his new play as incompatible with rural touring anyway. Is there such a thing? I have often talked about the kind of plays that are appropriate for taking to rural audiences, often connected to the fact that when we tour into village halls we are the visitors and have to take account of that fact. However, there’s nothing so provocative to a director as someone saying "I don’t think you could produce this." It was certainly a challenging play, both in content and in style, and blood and dissection don’t exactly come easy on the stage, especially the touring stage, and especially in venues where facilities are limited.

Through Playwrights East, I produced two script-in-hand performances of the play in Norwich and Cambridge. Both audiences relished the big themes of the play and its quirky comedy. At a workshop we re-orientated its back-story and realised how some of the more difficult moments could be brought off. In addition, two years ago VAT was removed from theatre tickets for companies with voluntary boards like ours. In consequence our Christmas show produced a greater surplus than planned and we wanted to do something adventurous with it. It was obvious really. And I quite liked the idea of all this blood and guts being subsidised by Customs & Excise.

We decided to present the play on our tithe barn tour because the natural fabric of the buildings and the strong work-ethic imbued in their traditional structures provides a neutral backdrop to any performance. For our London performance, we are very pleased to be returning to Upstairs at the Gatehoud which we first vitist last autumn with A Dulditch Angel. We have been made very welcome at the Gatehouse and thank them for their support.

Our final venue is the most extraordinary of all. The Hush House is an aircraft hanger on the old USAF Bentwaters’ site, now returned to civilian duties after its cold-war role. The hanger was specially constructed to accommodate the testing of jet engines and so was acoustically sealed to relieve the local population of the horrendous noise. This means its acoustic is suitable for theatre and it boasts an enormous tunnel one end, to give it the weird feel of a space- age venue. Once you have seen The Anatomist you will discover why we felt it was so appropriate, never mind exciting.

Ivan Cutting - Artistic Director