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Hello and welcome to Pivot Points. This is the podcast about the pivotal moments that have shaped our academic, professional and personal lives.

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I'm Sam Cooke, your head of communications at Wilson College. And I'm all about creating ways for you to share your stories like this podcast.

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Our guest today is playwright and theatre director Tom Brennan,

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who joined Wilson as our latest Jeffrey Guardian Creative Arts Fellow at the start of Michaelmas 2021.

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The Fellowship is named after a former Wolfson college bursar, and it celebrates visual arts, music, performing arts and creative writing.

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So as such, Tom has been holding writing workshops, performing play readings,

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and just generally talking us through the highs and lows, what it's like to run your own production company.

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And there'll be much more of this to come as he continues his fellowship through to 2024.

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I had a great chat with him a couple of months back about his take on theatre and generally what it's been like to burst into the Oxford bubble.

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As it started. It started. Oh, my gosh. Are you nervous about everyone's voices are going to change?

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Yeah. That's a really weird stuff. Yeah. Have you been on a podcast before?

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Yes, yes. I've been on a couple of the podcasts.

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One particular one I've had shows on. It's people like to sort of interview you about the show.

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Yeah. Yeah. True. Do you find that that is now becoming a more common like post show interview format?

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I think it was. And I think. I wonder if podcast Fashionability fashionable, fashionable.

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This kind of thing I like.

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I definitely make up words when I'm under pressure.

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Perhaps it's a pressure free podcast. So yeah.

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That is tough out. Yeah.

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I don't know. I've been thinking about. Oh, you know, I'd like to make a podcast, I'll do it.

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But there is something slightly terrifying about making your words sort of recorded and solid,

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because I change my mind all the time about, you know, fundamental beliefs.

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I just think I wouldn't want, you know, something I sort of said slightly facetiously in Know podcast to come and bite me on the neck.

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Although that sounds slightly problematic for somebody who essentially uses his words.

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I know. I know. But I think how does that play out? I don't know if art should be, like, morally good.

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You know, I the my favourite things have always been things that have had attention in

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them of where characters have said things that have been challenging something.

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A friend of mine recently said this thing. I want my my sense of good to be mocked by and interrogate.

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Sense of truth. Oh, I like that. She's quiet again.

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I want my sense of goods to be marked by an interrogated sense of truth.

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Mm hmm. That's good. That's good. It's quite it's quite a nice phrase, because I think it does tap into something which is like.

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And I think it relates to how I feel about theatre at the moment,

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which to me a lot of what I'm seeing in my industry is like a kind of self-congratulatory theatre which feels very smug,

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complete with itself, which everyone in the theatre can all agree with.

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The thing that's happening, like everybody is on the same side of the argument.

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Yeah, exactly. And we can all go and feel better about ourselves, and it's not cool to pose the other side.

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Yeah, right. I'm actually, you know,

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it's just an extension of the kind of cultural bubbles that we find ourselves in as opposed to finding the division points between us or.

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Poking fun at the audience or poking, you know,

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trying to find these little things like I call his name right now off top of my head, but said, you know, theatre isn't the.

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Isn't the pearl in the oyster. It's the salt. It's the it's sorry.

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It's the piece of sand. It's like the grips. It's like there should be something that.

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That's always my favourite stuff as that feels like a wakes me up in a slightly refreshes my senses,

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makes me think about something differently as opposed to confirming something I always knew was true.

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Yes. Yeah. And I. I'm seeing a lot of confirmation in the theatre.

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Yeah, I can imagine. Well, that kind of brings me on to one of my first question.

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So as any good interviewer, I did lots of research and read about you.

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And there's an old school which you wrote actually, in which you're hilariously quoted saying that as a teenager you were,

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quite frankly, a brilliant act and you thought you knew it.

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So obviously, from what I've read and my own conversations with you,

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I think you do have quite a knack for finding kind of humorous and absurd things in quite serious subjects.

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So I suppose I'm kind of interested in how important you think humour is in telling the truth of the story.

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I think that's, I suppose, related to my sensibility or my taste that I often find humour can break down people's defences.

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So if you want to talk about something difficult. It's human feels to me like a really good way of doing that.

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That through laughter, just like through tears or whatever, we can kind of open people up a little bit more.

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And so that's definitely always been my way in personally and artistically.

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It's like a friend of mine talked about my shows a few years ago and said, Oh, it's a bit like, Oh, he'd seen a few of them.

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And he was like, Oh, you're doing that thing where you go like, ha ha ha ha.

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You know, it's just really well, you know, a very, actually astute way of talking about a lot of the shows.

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I feel very proud of the ones in which we operate in that dynamic, though.

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What's the there are. There are. I really like complicated laughs ones in which you feel.

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I'm unsure about whether it's with you, but it's very revealing.

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Um, and also, I think, again, this sort of relates to how people place theatre.

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Is this sort of on this pedestal of like the most sort of spiritual literary art form in some ways.

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And there's this grand British tradition and.

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But some of my favourite shows have been ones in scrappy little fringe venues in which they're really playing between the audience and the actors.

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And I don't know why we have to sort of place it so high and holy that the comedy always, always feels like low on the pecking order of work.

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And maybe that's true for any art form. You know, the most sort of critically acclaimed pop music is always very serious, pop.

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It's like, actually, you know, what does funny pop music look like that great craft in that to you?

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Yeah. Yeah, for example. Okay. Well, I want to come back to the idea of kind of fringe theatre and comedy in a minute,

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but let's just take a huge step back, all the way back to when you were making films on family holidays.

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So I assume you weren't necessarily thinking about the role of humour in truth, when you were making those?

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Not really, no. But I mean, a specific example was so my dad, I don't know why he did this exactly, but he was always one for he was at that point,

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I suppose in the nineties where to buy a camcorder was quite a big deal, you know, it was quite expensive.

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It was like a big thing. And you know, this gadget that he would buy and then he would want to use it all the time.

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And he was kind of getting to grips with editing software in a very basic, hermetic way with his own computer and.

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And actually and so what I guess was his hobby that he would invite us into or make us do things because he also

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would do things like he would record interviews with us at different ages and things like that as a sort of record.

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But we started kind of these family films, which began as documentaries in a way slowly grew in scale.

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So we did. The first big one was a version of Robin Hood.

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We did want a camping trip with us and another family where I got to play Robin Hood.

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And as you could imagine, really excited. Really excited.

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And then these films like Grew and Grew so that we did two Bond films and on and off we

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aired version of Lawrence of Arabia that we called Lawn of Australia when I was great,

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and they're incredibly embarrassing to watch now. But he would sort of do all the.

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He built all the infrastructure around it.

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So he would do like title sequences and he would make a VHS box for it to live in and things like that that would have,

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you know, Photoshop versions of us,

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like looking like we were on a poster and and actually all of the kind of paraphernalia that went along with the film was really exciting and,

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and just that, that we could go on a walk and talk about the story and how it would work.

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And we did that. And I think the last one we made was when I was maybe 12 or 13.

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But actually it was an amazing lesson in kind of just.

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Making something from beginning to end that you could.

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Think of a story and actually make it happen, even if it looks sort of terrible.

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Yes. Was scrapple put together? So that actually was very inspiring.

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And we'd rope in all our friends to play the different parts and things and.

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They're sort of really a really weird record of me growing up with my sisters and all our friends and stuff.

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But I think it led to a sort of a sense of, oh, screw it, sort of.

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We can do we can do that, you know.

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And I think that that sensibility sort of followed me through is that you can think of something and make it happen,

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which is a big principle of of of my company, in a way.

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It's like a lot of our education work is built around that simple idea, which is you have a career, everyone has a career voice.

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And it's really just about giving yourself permission to let it out alone.

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That's a lot of people's biggest stumbling block is that they see brilliant things.

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Ira Glass said The thing about everyone's taste is amazing, but when you're starting out, your craft isn't very good.

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So. It's really heartbreaking because he made lots of bad things that never match your brilliant taste.

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And so you have to just kind of keep throwing yourself out there and making things

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until you've developed the craft to make the thing that matches your taste.

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Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it. Was there ever a point at which you thought you might do something else that wasn't there?

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Well, definitely. I mean, film and things. I guess there was always a sense for me about storytelling and like,

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I was really obsessed with films much more than I was theatre when I was growing up.

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But really, I just found myself in a, in a place that was so exciting in relation to theatre, which was the Bristol Bay Young Company.

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And that's that was a real change moment, really.

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It was finding myself that night. And at the time it was a rut in a very kind of slightly chaotic but very exciting way by a couple of people.

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And they. It was actually a time where the theatre was not open apart from the young company.

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So we sort of took the reins on every aspect of the theatre and we've produced these massive shows and it was completely,

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it was felt like running away to the circus or something. It was like very intense.

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And people would talk, the leaders would talk to you like you were adults.

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And for better or for worse, I mean, it was really intense.

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I don't think it was particularly healthy, but it was me and quite a few other people sort of found a home that were.

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And what age was this? That was maybe 15, 16.

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So still in school? Yes. That's kind of being given permission to just completely run your own show.

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Kind of, yeah. And they were very well like tightly directed and things like that.

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But they it was it was actually just that the it was a real step up from school place that the guy who run it would, you know, he'd,

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he'd like shout at you and swear if he did it, you know, there was a sort of intensity to everything that at that age I found to be very exciting.

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I look back and think, well, it wasn't very appropriate in lots of different ways, but at the time, the intensity of that experience was felt like.

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Really thrilling. Yeah. And then how did that inform you setting up your own production company?

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So when I was coming up to my gap year, we were invited.

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All of the members of the company were all graduates of the of the young company,

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I suppose, in lots of ways, and were invited to do this year's training programme.

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And some people had graduates from the university and some people were on their gap year and some people hadn't gone to university at all.

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And so we were offered basically two days a week training in exchange for our skills as workshop leaders and assistants.

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And the reason we're called the Wardrobe Ensemble is because we were plonked in the old wardrobe at the Bristol Vic,

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and it was this really scrappy room with loads of pot holes in the floor and it was really cold, but that's where we started.

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And then there were lots of transitions and changes within the theatre which led to then this kind

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of weird period of time where we sort of had to make a show for the studio without much leadership.

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And so then I, we formed a company called the Wardrobe Ensemble, and then I directed our first show, which was called Riot, which was a.

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A comedy about a true story of a riot that happened in an IKEA store in 2005 where they opened this new IKEA store and thousands of people

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showed up and there was a huge riot and first people were hospitalised and someone was stabbed and we just thought it was a such a funny,

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strange tale. Yeah, it was sort of humour.

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Yeah. But that we were, you know, it was like 2011 and.

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Actually, there wasn't a lot of conversation around, you know, Black Friday sales and consumerism in that way.

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And so it was a satire around. Consumerism and the lengths that people will go for a bargain.

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So yeah, but the, the we, we made that show and we were really designing it for the fringe.

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So the whole show was lit with IKEA lamps. So the whole show costs about 200 quid.

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We bought these lamps and set up extension lights on the floor and so we could take the show in 20 minutes because we could run in,

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pluck a six way extension down and we're off, we're ready to go.

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And the whole. And this is for Edinburgh Fringe. Yeah, yeah. So let's take a step back and say, how you doing?

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No, no, it's fine. Um, so how was Edinburgh Fringe?

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Kind of always in your sightline? Was that something that you in those days do?

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It was the way that a company could.

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It was kind of the only way that a company could show off their work.

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It was the Fringe Fringe Festival to go to. Um, if you were kind of unsupported and then produced and it was felt to be this sort of.

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You know, you would always hear the following year about the must see show on the fringe.

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And now I think it's very different because we've gone five times as a company, and every time we go back up, the rent goes up by a third.

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And if we were starting out, there was no way we could take our first show there.

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Now,

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it's only possible because we're playing to such big houses now and we get funding for the making of our shows and things that it's kind of feasible,

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but you just can't. It's not the whole infrastructure is just kind of melting.

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So I, I don't know what the future of Edinburgh is, but there are lots more fringe festivals now, like Brighton or Volts or um,

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and a lot and some really interesting kind of fringe venues like the Waterfront in Bristol,

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which you can go with not the biggest CV in the world, you know.

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It was definitely seen as a space where the sort of quality of work could rise to the top.

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Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, so I'm also particularly interested in, in another one of your plays.

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I don't know if this is, if this was related to Fringe or not.

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The 1972, the future of sex. Did you ever do that?

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We did, yeah. Yeah, we we that was the first sort of commission of one of our full company shows.

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And it was a real amazing turning point for us because we'd all come out of university and I'd difficult,

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I suppose what we would call our difficult second album was our second show,

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first three, which was about it was about the Chilean mining crisis of 2015.

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Is that right? So, you know, 20, 2010 or so.

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Anyway, it was a very difficult show to make in lots of ways.

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And then when we came to making 9072 the feature of sex, which began as can I Swear on this podcast, this is ugly.

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No, I'll try not to. Probably not. Yeah. So the working title was and maybe the History of F-word.

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And it was a sort of joke on the fact that, um.

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Well, we after making this show that was about the money crisis,

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the big thought for us that we should try and make something that was much closer to us that we could really talk about.

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And it would also mean that we could be enjoying humour a lot more.

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The last show was quite so self-serious in a way. So we start working on that.

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And then we had a sort of discovery about using history that when we place things in the past, we could talk about them in a much more easy way.

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So there was something about that. It released us and we found this moment in 1972 where.

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David Bowie appeared on Top of the Pops for the first time as singing Stardust.

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The first Gay Pride march was happening in London.

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Lady Chatterley's Lover had just been released to the public for the first time, and it felt like there were all these big cultural shift points.

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And so that day became the setting.

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The day that everybody is on top of pop for the first time became the setting for our show.

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And it was a sort of multi stranded narrative about different couples hooking up on this one night.

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And it was the most unbelievably easy show to make, and I have no idea quite why,

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other than we all had a shared language of what of the tone and what we wanted it to feel like.

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And also no one expected anything from us at that point.

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So it was just felt like a free conversation.

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We weren't trying to prove ourselves or we were trying to prove ourselves, but we weren't.

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It didn't feel like we were hindered in any way.

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And after the first two weeks of R&D, we'd had the skeleton for the entire show that it turned out to be.

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Really, we just polished it for the rehearsal process.

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Yeah, it was a really exciting show to make. You know,

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it sounds it and I suppose I'm bringing it up now because I think public conversations around

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sex sense and gender disparity have developed so much even in the last couple of years,

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100%, you know, with some with movements like Reclaim the Streets.

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And definitely, you know, those are not isolated movements or incidents.

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But I'm I'm kind of interested in the role that you think theatre plays in capturing a certain moment in time.

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But then also to what to what extent is this or a little bit like academia in the sense that you're kind

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of building on each other's work in order to develop this whole body of research or body of stories?

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Yes. Is there a do you feel there's a similar process? And finally, I do think that ooh, that's such an interesting set of points that.

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Uh. I think each one of our shows is,

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to a degree autobiographical and that you can't help but kind of express the different anxieties of of of each moment that we find ourselves in.

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And maybe I'll talk a bit more about that later in regards to that show.

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I mean, I do think. We started it because we thought it would be funny.

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And from the initial conversation,

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it was clear we we all had a lot to say on the matter and that we felt like because there was a lot of trust there in the company,

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we could really talk about that stuff. And one of the things that came out of that was.

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A conversation around gender and voice within the company that we ask the question of each other what?

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When did we speak in the company? And all the men said, Oh, I speak when I have an idea.

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And all the women said, Well, I have my idea. I think about it.

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I find the right moment to say, I think five is a good enough idea.

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And then I speak. And it was a real moment for us that we continued to have those conversations along lots of different lines.

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But about the way that and it's not to beat up men for doing that because it's a sort of my confidence.

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For example, it's not like I have to I have to take responsibility for that, for the fact that I might bulldoze a room,

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for example, and, and try and shift my behaviour accordingly, but not to sort of like beat myself up for it.

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And so we continue to have conversations in the company about.

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The the many kind of well lots that can be lots of sort of moments where the.

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The balance tips to fall one way.

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And so we're trying to always make sure that everyone in the company has a voice and can speak freely,

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because sometimes two people might get locked into a very exciting conversation and don't realise that no one else is giving it.

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Being given a space to talk and think. Yeah, but in regards to this idea of like the sort of body of work,

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I really like that sense that potentially we're just remaking the same show over and over again,

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you know, through different lenses or different guises.

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The other thought is that we're sort of trying to fix the problems of our previous show.

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So whatever we did confidently with one show, we're trying to sort of.

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So, for example, just before COVID, we made a show called The Last of the Pelican Daughters,

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which was the closest we've ever come to making a sort of full family drama, naturalistic play, which was born of the sense that we want to.

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Well, what emerged out of that was a need to make richer characters with more psychological depth.

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And then the next show we made was essentially a dance cabaret about the history of capitalism through

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food production and was absolutely a rejection of everything we've done in the previous show.

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And I think we're always trying to think about that. So we get bored quite easily.

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So we're sort of thinking, okay, well, let's abandon everything of that push into something else.

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But also, I think you just as a human, you're constantly learning, right?

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So obviously the next thing that you write and produce you, you have learnt things that you didn't know when you wrote that previous version.

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So in that sense it does feel very similar to academia.

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And when I, you know, if I write a piece about something and then I write the next piece,

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I know that there are certain arguments in the previous one that are flawed and I have to reshape it.

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Yeah, yeah. I'm bringing. You think? Definitely. And what are those moments where you feel like there is a synthesis between your ideas?

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You know what? What is it that made 1972 feel like?

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The easiest show in the world. I have no idea. So maybe it was it was the right thing to say at that time.

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And then conversation and culture develops over the years. And then if you do that again now, it might be a slightly different story.

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Definitely would be a different show, you know? And that's exactly right.

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I don't think people were talking about it in that with the article. I see that they're talking about it now.

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Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. So all of these experiences and in one way or another have brought you here.

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Yes. Wilson in Oxford. How does that feel? It feels really amazing because it feels like a personal validation of what I've been doing that I think

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there is a feeling when you're part of a big ensemble devising company that you can kind of get lost.

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And then I know that I am the company and I'm also not the company.

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And so that when people say positive things about the company's work, that's me and also not me and all those kind of things.

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I guess the thing for Wolfson that's given me a great deal of confidence is like Tom Brent is that is this person that's,

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you know, that's a real thrill. It's very rare for me to own kind of things like that.

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And it's given me a great deal of freedom to think a bit more long term about the projects that I want to do.

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So much of the my career has been built around just trying to keep my head above water and and creating projects month on month for a month.

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This has given me a much longer period of time to think about, which has been pretty life changing.

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I think something that nearly always comes up whenever I ask people about how they feel now that they're

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at Oxford is the sense of imposter syndrome that really seems to be universal in this community?

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Yeah. Is that something that you identify with or do you feel kind of comfortable enough in what you're doing that you don't feel subject to that?

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I do think I feel that. And as someone who when I was a teenager in a state school in Bristol, like.

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Felt like and again, it may be relates to this cocky character that was the one who was like I felt like I was, you know, the best actor in school.

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And I felt like I was really good at English and things.

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But I also didn't have any guide in terms of what I should do to push myself.

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And my parents, who I love very much, are very supportive, weren't pushy parents and ones who knew how to sort of.

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Well, yeah. Deal with me in some ways. I mean, they've always been very confused about what, freelancing and things like that.

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Right. So that's funny. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess I always, I, you know, wanted the Oxbridge thing.

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It's like a source of great envy for me because of the image that I have in my brain and also

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throughout my career has become a source of great rage in that there's obviously a sort of class issue,

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Oxbridge, and it's one that in the theatre industry I was just always so astounded by things just happening.

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If you went to experience like Oh suddenly you know everyone and that's very clear

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here that the level of talent that is just comes to the Oxbridge is so extraordinary.

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So I obviously sort of had a shorthand in relation to a sort of damning Oxbridge.

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You know, I'm here, I feel very strange.

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So you've been running some creative writing workshops? Yes.

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How do you feel those have landed? And also what did you want to achieve with them in the first place?

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The creative writing workshops were really about seeing where people were at with just writing.

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And I've I paused those for a little while because I had some quite intense.

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I was putting up a few shows and things, but I'd like to bring them back.

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And it's worth noting as well that these, these writing workshops are open to everyone.

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Yeah, but also just people who feel they associate with arts and theatre.

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Exactly. And because they were every week I didn't want to.

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It's, it was more about just creating space to write.

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So what they emerged, what they felt like the most useful thing was about writing prompts for an hour and a half.

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And I think if I, when I bring it back with them,

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might be a little bit more focussed in terms of things to produce, but that's is a really core principle for me.

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It's like about just creating the right circumstances to be able to write.

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So they're quite low key. Um. And relaxed.

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Mm hmm. And I just sort of deliver promise for people.

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Yeah, but it's. It was quite a nice. A nice, um, supportive environment, I think.

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But I'm also going to be doing a few more things this time, so I'm going to be the dates are a little bit up in the air at the moment,

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but I'm going to be talking in a lot more depth about my company's process and the history of the company as a sort of presentation talk thing.

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And then also going to be reading a play up and working on, which is a one person play about,

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uh, Ireland that's discovered between England and France fictional island.

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Mm. I love the point that it's a fictional story.

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It's not really a real. Or maybe it is. And then.

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And things like that. So I feel like I may bring the creative writing group back and I think I probably will.

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But there's also other things. I'll be presenting it. Okay.

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Interesting. Um, now, I've been saving your final pivot point to Sylvia, and because I thought I think it might have quite a humorous angle to it.

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So your final your final pivot point is when you watched an Australian production of the Wild Duck at the Barbican, which is interesting Ibsen play.

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Can I just quickly jump back because I know this seems like ridiculous to sort of say,

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but I think it taps into a lot of the conversation we were having, which was about the first show and when we took it to Edinburgh.

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So this was the show about the riot and I care, this is kind of the punchline of the story, which is about we can't mess that up.

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Well, it is important because of sort of how it ties into these ideas of creativity in a way,

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which was that we'd made this funny show, right, with set in an IKEA store with all these lamps.

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And we took it to the Edinburgh Fringe 2020, sorry, 2011.

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And we did our first show and it was really bad.

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It was a real shambles and we felt incredibly nervous and it was only half full, which actually for French times, pretty good.

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And and there was a walkout and things like that.

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So we went back to our flat and talked about shifting things around.

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We wrote a new beginning for the play that would sort of set things up and feel as awkward and we'd change things around.

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And then we went to sleep. And overnight a sort of professional miracle happened, which was that the London riots happened.

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So obviously not a great moment, but it suddenly transformed our show from one thing into another without us doing anything.

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Suddenly our show was like biting political satire, despite the fact we'd really not changed anything.

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And I guess it's just that thing with you, you can sort of like talk about things you want to talk about.

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They're in the air, but you can't really chase. It's like, guys suddenly our show like,

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sold out for the entire fringe and people were forging tickets to come and we set up a whole tour because of that.

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And I really think we wouldn't be together as a company if that hadn't happened.

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So something completely outside of our control, you can try to make the show as good as you possibly can,

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but some things that just come out of nowhere and suddenly you have a craving.

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Yeah. And I suppose that just things back to what we were saying about telling the right story at the right time.

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Yeah. And sometimes, sometimes you know what, what moment you kind of jump into that.

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Sometimes other things just jump into your moment I guess.

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Exactly. Exactly. Okay. So just going back to the wild doctrine.

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So this is I mean, this is a fairly is thing, really.

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I just think sort of quite funny. So in this remake of Real Live Dogs is Waddles Across the Sea.

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Yeah, it's a really lovely production by Simon Stone.

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And also why, why why did this make such a big pivotal?

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Well, I'd tell you, basically, it's kind of embarrassing, but I wanted a moment that was sort of personal, which was that I really liked the show,

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but I remember going home on the train and the Wild Duck is a play is kind of very well structured tragedy.

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But there's a few moments in it where.

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I kept thinking while I was watching it, if if the characters could just get over themselves, everyone would be happy.

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If you just allowed yourself to like. Just.

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Just get over, like, just stop worrying about this. You'd be.

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You could find yourself in a position of happiness. And I.

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And I guess I was going home from Bristol, thinking about my best friend Emily,

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and how essentially I would just be happy if we were in a relationship.

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And I think it was sort of gave me permission to sort of.

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With that relationship. Get over myself and just.

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And then a few months later, we got together. And now we're. And this is who you wrote the song Production Company?

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Yeah, we had the company together. Yeah, but very glad.

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But it was just this thing of, like this and tragedy, I suppose.

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I don't know what the purpose of tragedy is, but for me, it was about, you know, showing human beings behaving in ways.

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And as an audience, from the outside, you can see. Just get over it like it's going to be.

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It's okay if you just. And I guess I try to hold on to that sense of that.

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If you hold things a bit more lightly, actually, things can. Something's making you happy.

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Sometimes you can just do that thing, and that's. That's good. I think that's okay for any really solid piece.

348
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Like I said, it sounds like. So this kinda, like, chased her, but it wasn't quite like that.

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Well, thank you. Something that was. That was really great.