Introduction

Spring and summer are such busy months in the world of theatre and for Sabotage as a company. May usually sees in the start of the season with performances in our home town of Brighton as part of the Fringe festivities that take over the city for a whole sunny month. Then we have performances on different dates throughout the summer at venues across Sussex, Kent and further afield, often finishing up at a festival just as autumn is on the horizon.

This year is of course very different. We’ve been at home since the middle of March and for me it’s the longest time I’ve spent in one single place in at least a decade! I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on life as a rural touring theatre company and share some stories to give our audience an insight into what goes into making our plays. I have been working with Sabotage for several years now and we’ve produced three original plays in that time, ‘Owlers', ‘The Looker’, and ‘We Are Not Shellfish’. I had worked with Sabotage’s founder and artistic director, Zoe, at various festivals with another theatre company when I first came to see ‘Ravens’ on tour in Kent. I absolutely loved the writing, the mixture of wit and wisdom alongside local history, as well as the setting and the sumptuous design of the show. I stayed on site for a few days between performances as I rarely return home if there’s the option of sleeping out in a field somewhere instead. We swam in the sea, I was given a cello lesson in the open air and I was invited to ride one of the horse handlers’ beautiful horses at dusk. Quite an idyllic introduction to the company. The next time Zoe wrote a new script I was eager to attend the read through as I was curious to know what was on the horizon. Auditions were being held in Brighton, and I sat in so that there was someone for actors to read opposite in the scenes they had been sent to prepare. After that I came along to rehearsals to get some rehearsal shots, and when ‘Owlers' was taken on tour I joined the company on the road to take more photographs and have been involved ever since.

These days I’m the stage manager for Sabotage as well which is great fun. It’s challenging and creative work which allows us to see some wonderful places and meet interesting people wherever we go. Whilst everyone has been spending so much time at home lately we’ve all had to discover different ways to be resourceful and inventive. We hope that hearing more about how we work will spark some new ideas as well as making your next trip along to one of our shows all the more intriguing and accessible. There will always be a great need for people to come together to communicate ideas and express the emotional impact of their experiences. That’s what makes theatre and live arts so vital to us, both as individuals and communities. So if there is anything particular that you’d like to know a little more about, please do drop us a line or send us a video with your questions. We look forward to hearing from you and we hope you enjoy discovering a little more about Sabotage behind the scenes.

words by Zinta Gercans