Q&A with Alex Bird, Co-founder of Tortoise in a Nutshell and Director of Concerned Others

By Amie Barton-Young

A huge welcome from Rugby’s Macready Theatre! Have you ever worked in Rugby or Warwickshire before?

HI! Thank you very much for having us, it’s a proper pleasure to be coming to Warwickshire for the first time, we’re really looking forward to it.

Concerned Others is described as an “intimate tabletop performance”. What will this look like for our audiences and what goes into making a production like this?

Great question. The main set piece of Concerned Others is a crescent moon shaped table. It’s where the action of the piece takes place in part, but it’s also the main component of the piece’s lighting design. The stories, opinions and accounts that you hear in the show are all quite intimate (they all stem from a series of one-to-one interviews that took place over a period of six months), so setting those stories in an intimate space felt very important. It’s a piece with lots of little details, that hopes to try and pass on people’s lived experience in an imaginatively accessible way.

In terms of making and creating…it’s a lot of hours! As I say the first big step was actually in research and conversation with a whole host of different people with a background in the recovery community. That led to around twenty-three recorded interviews, which have gone on to feature in the piece via recordings of people’s voices.

After that there’s then a lot of time outlay in refining the stage design, building and creating the various items and props (the piece uses a range of miniatures and models…all of which take a long time to come together)! All in all, the whole process took around 18 months with a team of ten or so people working intermittently. So it’s a lot of hard work by a lot of very dedicated people. 

Could you tell us about the inspiration behind the production?

So, the piece speaks a bit to our background as a company. Tortoise in a Nutshell has a passion for creating work that collaborates with communities, which seeks to serve a social function and creating inspiring and imaginative performances.

We initially started thinking about people’s experience of substance dependency during the period of the pandemic, when we came across a fair amount of writing which talked about the challenges of that period for people in the recovery community.

We started wondering if a visual theatre, performance format, might be helpful in spreading awareness of some of that experience. We spent a lot of time thinking about whether we were the right people to try and do something like that, whether something performance based would help or hinder people’s stories. After speaking with a lot of people we did eventually feel that we could create something as long as its motivation was purely about passing lived testimony on, and not inserting our own views or opinions into the process. That’s an easier thing to say than to do (how do you edit someone’s words from an hour-long interview without changing their meaning)? But it was a really joyful process, that allowed us to meet some brilliant and wonderful people.

How much of the performance is verbatim?

All of the recorded conversation from the piece comes from people from across the spectrum of the recovery community. So loved ones, third sector workers, clinicians, people in recovery, group volunteers, researchers. We’ve tried to make something that leaves space for all of those voices, whilst also resting on our practice as visual theatre makers. So whilst the piece features a lot of words it also really rests on images and small imaginative worlds to depict the stories you’re hearing. 

What is special about creating work inspired by real-life events and statistics?

There’s obviously a real direct link to people’s lives. All of the stories and moments of the piece stem from someone’s lived experience, so there’s a definite specificity to the responsibility of that.

In terms of statistics, the best thing is being able to share them and then provide a more living context for them. I find it really easy to get lost in numbers on a page, they’re really enticing. But meeting someone face to face, and getting the chance to share in that person’s story is a proper privilege. You feel very lucky when someone shares that with you, so being able to pass it on in the way they want feels really good.  

So, who is the show for?

Everyone! Which might seem broad…but the idea really was to create a unit of time for anyone and everyone to come and spend thinking about a topic that effects a huge number of people, but often with a huge deal of stigma attached to it. The motivation of the show is to help in the wider movement of projects and campaigns aimed at breaking down that stigma, to allow a kind and shared space for people to think about substance addiction and the role it plays in our society, hopefully in an empowering and beautiful way.

That said, please be advised the age guidance is 14+ due to the themes.

What do you want audiences to take away from this performance?

Oooh gosh. Well, that’s maybe tougher than it sounds. All of our work is really invested in supporting the imagination and voice of people other than ourselves. In a funny way I don’t really have something specific that I hope people take away…but I do hope people get the chance to really consider the perspectives of the people whose voices appear in the show. We spoke to so many inspiring people, whose work is often out of the view of the general public. They spoke with real passion, commitment and care, and getting to hear them is really powerful.

We know substance addiction isn’t an easy topic to think about, it affects a lot of people in a really profound way, but if people are willing to give it a chance we really hope and think they’ll love the piece.  

SPECIAL OFFER

Thanks to Rugby School’s generous sponsorship, for two nights only Macready Theatre is offering100 tickets at just £1 each to see Concerned Others fresh from their 2023 sell-out run at Edinburgh Fringe. 

With 50 £1 tickets available for Sunday, 20 October, and 50 more for Monday, 21 October, this is an incredible opportunity to experience powerful theatre for less than the price of a coffee. 

Concerned Others tackles a deeply affecting topic—addiction and substance-related death. Through intimate storytelling, innovative stagecraft and real-life accounts, multi-award-winning company Tortoise in a Nutshell brings to light the experiences of families, loved ones, and clinicians supporting those facing substance dependency.

Don’t miss out on this special offer—secure your £1 tickets now and join us for an unforgettable evening!