From Ludlow to the Pleasance

 

As Shropshire-based Pentabus brings its latest production to the capital, London-born artistic director Orla O’Loughlin tells Sam Marlowe what made her decamp to the country

 

You never know where a Pentabus production might pop up.  It might be on stage at the Royal Court or Dublin International Festival – but it could just as easily be in a pub, a village hall or even a cave 200 feet underground.  This year, the Ludlow-based company celebrates its thirty-fifth birthday – and with it, a history of making eclectic and innovative work that, while firmly rooted in the soil of its rural locale, branches out to embrace issues of national significance.

 

‘We’re not producing “The Archers” or “local plays for local people” ’ declares Orla O’Loughlin, who’s been the company’s artistic director since 2007.  After a year at the Donmar Warehouse as a resident assisntant director, first to Sam Mendes then to Michael Grandage, she landed a

post in the international department at the Royal Court.  She describes it as ‘the most fascinating time’ – and yet, a year later, she packed her bags and upped sticks for the historic market town on the Welsh border.  Why?

 

‘People thought I was completely bonkers!’ she admits.  ‘Everything was going so well and I was extremely happy.  But I suddenly got a very specific urge to live and work outside the capital.  I wanted a new challenge.  When the position came up at Pentabus, I did some research and I was very struck by the surprising output of this company.  It felt provocative and ambitious, and the variety of scale was really appealing.  There’s a different quality of time and space when working here.  There’s a sense of being able to draw people to come and work with us who feel that they are away from the pressures of an urban centre.’

 

Real country life is no golden idyll: previous Pentabus shows have tackled such knotty subjects as the working conditions of immigrant agricultural workers, and the all-white homogeneity of communities outside our cities.  It’s the schism between urban and rural that informs the company’s current touring production, ‘Tales of the Country’, which plays in London next week.

 

Adapted by Nick Warburton from journalist Brian Viner’s book and columns in The Independent, it tells of how Viner and his family left behind comfortable Crouch End to pursue their bucolic dream in Herefordshire – and the bumblings, blunders and well-meaning efforts to fit in of this set of pampered ‘buggers from off’, which were an exacting trial for the Viners and a source of enormous amusement to the locals.  The show is, admits O’Loughlin who directed it, unusually conventional for Pentabus – ‘but it’s just proved so popular.  Local audiences just love being able to laugh openly at incomers.’

 

There is, of course, a more serious side to the tension between town and country.  A recent project saw a group of writers working a shift in a high-end restaurant, spending an afternoon in an abattoir and exploring the concerns of local farmers, some of whom, says O’Loughlin, regarded them initially with suspicion.  She’s in no doubt that the rural-urban divide is ‘huge’ – and says it has rarely been more to the fore in Pentabus’s work than in a piece about fox-hunting.  ‘Our work on that project threw up all kinds of very strong feelings about who in the UK holds the power, and where that power is.  Britain is very Londoncentric.’  That metropolitan view, she says, is limiting.  ‘Market towns have a reputation as fantastic weekend getaways for nice middle-class couples – and they are,’ says O’Loughlin.  ‘But the people who actually live there, particularly working-class people, are not necessarily so well catered for.’  By way of illustration she cites the situation of Ludlow’s youngsters, priced out of many establishments tapping into the visitor trade, resorting to ‘sitting in groups of five around one coffee in Costa’ – an issue to be tackled by writer Tim Price in a Pentabus commission next year.

 

As for O’Loughlin herself, maybe she’ll always be an ‘incomer’, but she seems pretty settled, personally and professionally.  ‘It always boils down to people and place: where we are affecting who we are and how we are – that’s at the heart of everything.’

 

Time Out  May 6^th-12^th  2010