Braw, Strang, Halesome Arts

It seems odd that while there are currently plenty of items in my life sabotaging inner peace via my over-thinking prone mind these days, the overall feeling when I reflect on this year’s summer is that of expectant excitement for ‘what next?’. I get the same joy and satisfaction when I watch a really good film or tv series knowing that the sequel or the director’s new work is already being worked on. A similar, but even more intense feeling, overcomes me when a collective demographic I consider myself part of experiences an activism win or when an electoral result I've supported sends a strong message to the establishment. I am sorry to say that sadly neither of the latter has been part of my life for a while now, so finding myself experiencing the same intense feelings of pride and joy caught my attention.

The culprit is a small and new theatre company called Braw Clan. I am involved with them as a filmmaker and because I absolutely love their concept and principles… very similar to my involvement with Common Weal. They specialise in Scots language stage productions and have a very strong emphasis on community theatre within the very rural and beautiful Clydesdale area in South Lanarkshire, which I am fortunate to call home.

Braw Clan has been working as a team of very talented individuals for a couple of years now and have been interacting with the local community all the way through their growth. This summer they finally got the resources for the public stage tour of ‘Secret Wrapped in Lead’ by Braw Clan’s co-founder and the team’s scriptwriter, Martin Travers. To say it went well doesn’t even begin to make it justice. I knew it was a great play, since I had attended a reading of it before. I knew these were a bunch of talented humans because most of them are my pals and I know their background and passion for their art. I knew that mountains of hard work had gone into it even before I was recruited into this particular stage project, so the combination of all those things is always a good way to start. But what I didn’t know was that it would be so amazingly well received by the audience, our local community and the press. The show was designed to be played in small village halls to provide folk who don’t have the same access to theatre as enjoyed by those living in cities (or in places with good public transport links, even!) with quality entertainment at their doorstep. And so it toured seven small town and village venues and offered a free-ticketed show where audiences would book a seat, but would only pay what they felt was deserved after watching the show. The show sold out for all 8 dates with close to 600 tickets all in all, and the reviews from press and attendees alike were glowing and most heartwarming. I think the question of whether folk in these small villages, often overlooked by those funding the arts and culture in our country, have an appetite for theatre has been answered quite soundly.

So now that the whole excitement about it all has settled and that my pals have finally had a chance to recover and rest, I went to Pauine Lynch, Braw Clan’s co-founder, the artistic director for the show, an extremely talented writer and actor and my good friend and asked to share some of her experiences with you in the hopes that this might peak your creativity, might give you courage to try a creative adventure within your local community and that it might infect you with a similar sized grin as the one I am sporting at the moment as I think of all the wonderful ways in which this has made our local community richer. 

CRISTINA: Pauline, tell us first, how you got here, to this moment in your artistic life and what might have led you to this specific version of you.

PAULINE: So, my artistic career, if you like, has been as an actor. And then when I had my children, I couldn't do that so much because I was touring so often and I felt I had to be at home. And when I was at home, that gave me more time to write. And through the process of writing, I started with theatre. I thought that was the natural place for me to do anything but quickly moved on to exploring other areas of writing. And then I had a play produced and I had two books published and I thought, That's it, that's me. I'm a writer, I am not an actor anymore. And I realised that really, if I thought there wasn't a lot of money in acting, there was even less in writing. So I got myself a part time job to support myself while I was writing. And then we had a pandemic, and I had been in this job for a couple of years and I wasn't very satisfied. And I found that it actually left me drained and I wasn't able to write quite as often as I'd like. And so I've had enough and when I heard about this guy who had wanted to start a theatre company nearby, I literally one day just went “Yes, I'm going to get back in theatre”. And got in touch with Martin, met up with him and though he definitely had a better idea about how to actually set up a theatre company than me, he just didn't have the network that I had down here. So we got chatting and we had very similar ideas about the type of theatre we wanted to make. And well, then we just set about the business of making it happen.

So first of all, we brought together all the people roundabout this area that we knew would be the backbone of this company, and we made sure that everybody was on board with it before we pushed a hands off. 

C: So your starting infrastructure was based on people rather than physical facilities? 

P: Oh, yeah, totally. It's all about the people. It's all about the artists and this area, and it's all about the people living there. 

C: That is interesting to me because that means that this could be replicable model for the rest of Scotland. 

P: Totally! 100%. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the reasons that doesn't happen so much is because people don't think they can do it. I think maybe I did feel, you know, I needed somebody else to come along and show me how to do it. And then… Seriously, here's a cliche, but: I can do it… We can do it, you know what I mean?

But it's teamwork. It's finding the right people to do it because there's no way I could have done it by myself. And so suddenly we set about the process of registering the company and then chasing that charitable status to help us get funding. And then that's it. It's a relatively easy process. But when you've never done it before, it seems overwhelming. I've no doubt that other people could have done it a lot faster than we did. But everything has been a first time experience, and so it felt like a lot of work. 

And and then Clare (Yuille; Braw Clan’s marketing director) came on board and she immediately elevated everything we were doing because she's got such a strategic mind and she brings all these other skills that Martin and I don't have like building a website, mailing lists and she just grew everything much faster than if we'd been just the two of us.

C: How did ‘Secret Wrapped in Lead’ materialise after all this?

P: Well, we got a micro grant from the Biggar Community Council so we used it to pay actors to do our rehearsal reading of Martin's play ‘Secret Wrapped in Lead’, and Clare was able to harness the audience feedback in such an amazing way that we were in a really strong position to go to Creative Scotland and say, “Look, the community down here really wants this to happen.” And from that point onwards, it just went like a juggernaut, really. That was the main goal. We got there and we've done it, and it went brilliantly! And now we are looking towards the next thing that we can do. 

C: What were the challenges of staying away from the well-trodden models for putting on a show? You know, using proper theatre venues, proper ticketing services, etc.

P: Yeah, So it's small scale touring. So we were going into village halls and each village hall is different. So there has to be a degree of flexibility built into what you're doing. So for instance, with our show, we used a stage that was a certain size to fit most venues, but there were a couple of venues that were too small. So we had to have a stage that was malleable enough to adjust to to fit the new space. There were challenges in terms of lights and speakers placements, entrances and exits couldn't always be in the same space, etc. So there always had to be a degree of flexibility in how we approached it. But on the other hand, there were brilliant advantages because we're not travelling with a heavy set and it created a degree of intimacy because the audience were so close and they were surrounding the whole entire thing. And that was what we wanted. We just wanted them to to really enjoy the actors performances and to really concentrate on the story which was in Scots and therefore quite unfamiliar.

C: Aaaah, that’s another thing where you guys were breaking ground. The play being in Scots must have meant uncertainty about whether your audience would have been unfamiliar with the vocabulary used and all. I imagine funders might have expressed a degree of scepticism too. How did you deal with that?

P: We didn't anticipate any reservations from the funder, but we anticipated reservations from audiences. And so for that reason, Martin had an English speaking character who really helped reflect what was going on on stage when it got a little bit more complicated. But certainly after every show, we gave our audience feedback cards and very few of them said that the Scots was an issue. And in fact lots of them said “I'm English and I didn't expect to enjoy this, but I really, really did”. And I think it was because there is so much more than just words on a page… you know what I mean? The actors bring so much in terms of their performance that actually it doesn't matter if you don't get every single word, you still capture the intention of it, like when folk go to the opera.

C: And what do you think now that it's over, now that you had your success, glowing reviews, amazing audience feedback, etc., what was the most successful point of the experience?

P: Well, it’s reassuring. We know it's a success because of a combination of things. We knew it was a success because everybody who worked in the production left feeling fulfilled and happy and satisfied. And really part of something. Then after each performance, we had a Q&A session with the audiences and that was a really unexpected joy. Getting access to people's real, genuine, immediate reaction to what they've just seen on the stage, being able to hear their level of support for the work that you're doing and their desire to come back and see more. And through that we know that we had people who have never been to the theatre before, and they came because it was right on their doorstep and they would never have dreamed of going. We found that by running this ‘Pay what you decide’ model, people can book without fear or obligation. If they hate the show, they do not need to waste their hard earned cash on it. You know what I mean? To empower them to decide for themselves and they don't need to travel very far. They can literally pop out of their house and they can walk to it. And so we found that we've brought in people who would not normally go to the theatre. And we know that we've brought in people who have never been to the theatre before. 

I think what motivates me is that I didn't do anything until I went to high school and took drama and it woke me up. And to think that there are people out here, young people out there now, who don't get that kind of opportunity. And I think everyone should have access to it. It's just really good fun, you know? Maybe not for everybody, but if you enjoy it, then it's brilliant. And I think everyone should at least have access to it.

That's why it's important and that's why it's important to make that sort of work. Because if you're making the sort of work that matters to people, then suddenly the arts as a sector becomes much more important in the minds of people who might not not have thought it was valuable to them.

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