Interviews: El Blackwood and Grace Gallagher

If 14 years of Conservative government have been challenging for the arts, they have also been fertile ground for creative subject matter. Cultural offerings exploring themes of austerity and cuts; social inequality; health; education and culture wars have become mainstays of the UK’s arts landscape and the Edinburgh Fringe programme alike over the past decade. But as of July 4, we are told, change is afoot: a Labour government committed to “raising the next generation of creatives” holds the levers of power for the first time since 2010. 

But with the election result coming just three weeks ahead of this year’s Fringe, many of this year’s festival offerings will still reckon with the legacy of the past 14 years. How do creatives examining the inequalities and harm set in motion by previous governments feel about the political moment in which their shows arrive – and will the dawn of a new government change how audiences relate to their subject matter?

Both Ugly Bucket’s “blazing inferno” Stuffed, about food insecurity, and Tending, a “heartbreaking, hilarious and very human look at the experience of nurses,” use verbatim theatre to tell their stories, and both emerged from one of the defining failures of the previous government: the Covid-19 pandemic. Stuffed was born from company members’ experiences of volunteering in foodbanks over lockdown, while Tending has its roots in the experience of one nurse in particular – the show's assistant producer, who is also a long-time best friend of playwright El Blackwood.

“The initial idea came from our conversations during Covid – both of us recognised that rather than hearing directly about nurses’ experiences, what we were hearing was stereotypes and hero worship,” says Blackwood of her conversations with the paediatric ICU nurse. 

“Often that can lead to the justification of extended bad treatment; the idea that they’re angels so they can’t stop and they can’t complain, because that’s not who they are.”

What followed were interviews with 70 nurses taking place over a year, and exploring all aspects of their work from the good to the bad, the personal to the structural and everything in between. Every word spoken in Tending was also spoken by a real-life nurse in one of these interviews, Blackwood points out, making the final production all the more impactful. 

“I think this approach is far more representative and far more authentic than fictionalising nurses’ accounts, and you get a multiplicity of perspectives rather than creating something monolithic” she says. “The audience feels like they’re witnessing something and that lens is an incredibly powerful one.”

Tending / Photo by Lucy Hayes

It was the same pursuit of truth and authenticity which led Ugly Bucket to verbatim theatre, an approach which has underpinned previous productions as well as Stuffed. Co-artistic director Grace Gallagher and colleagues embarked on a similar research process to that of Blackwood, using testimony from conversations with people working in food banks across England to shape the script and physical clowning elements which make up the production. 

“A lot of what we try to do is around educating people, and we could make a show about statistics and the sheer magnitude of numbers, but we prefer to think about this idea of emotional education and creating empathy,” says Gallagher. “As human beings we’re emotional creatures and it’s emotion that fuels us – if I can make an audience empathise with one person’s individual story or truth, that’s more likely to impact change.”

Both productions spent time in the run up to this year’s Fringe considering their relationship to the general election including, in Blackwood’s case, whether the performance should be delayed until next year. But, say both, the issues they explore are bigger than a single government. 

“For us, particularly as a Liverpool-based theatre company, it felt like it could have been really easy to make a show which just says ‘fuck the Tories’ for an hour,” says Gallagher. “But while there’s a lot of accountability to be had in austerity and the government we’ve had for the past 14 years, we wanted to be constructive in moving us forward and bringing people together.

“There isn’t one answer to this problem and now we’ve got this huge shift in government, that doesn’t automatically equal the solution.”

Social impact is also key to both productions, with Stuffed collecting for Edinburgh foodbanks throughout their run and Tending partnering with the Cavell Trust and offering a pre-Fringe reading in Shotts, North Lanarkshire, where a high proportion of NHS staff live. Outside of the Fringe, both productions make use of panel discussions and Q&As to bring the issues to life and inspire action among audiences. 

Time will tell what difference a Labour government might make to the arts sector and the country more widely, but a sense of change and cautious optimism among Fringe-goers this year is a constructive backdrop to both productions, say Gallagher and Blackwood. 

“We decided to go for this year instead of next, in part because it’s such a fertile ground for discussion,” says Blackwood. “A time of political change is a fantastic time for the show to be on.”

And for Gallagher, “I hope what happens is that the hope in the show feels more hopeful, and that maybe we feel less of the helplessness.

“But I still think it will feel angry. We need to feel hopeful and positive that change is coming but we can’t sit too comfortably in that – we still need to have an audience leaving thinking there are still things that need to be fought for.”