Becoming Pushing Boundaries

“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.” (Herman, 2001, 1).

 From the very beginning of the process, our group wanted to create a theatre company that dealt with issues that had an impact upon society. From satire to comedy to political theatre, the primary aim and style of our company was continuously changing through our collective and individual research. By looking at plays from Simon Stephens and David Hare, we became interested in producing theatre that focused on national political issues. With this in mind, we decided to call ourselves X-Pose Theatre Company, a company that primarily focused on the political matters of the nation.

X-Pose logo

With our theatre company formed, we then decided to designate ourselves roles that would suit our skills and ultimately benefit the company. As I have always been heavily involved with acting, I opted for my primary role to be that of an actor, with editor of the script as my secondary role.

While at first we were content with the route we were heading down, we quickly realised that in order to connect with the city that our performance would essentially be based in, we had to instead focus on societal issues that affect the Lincoln community. This view is evident within our manifesto as we want audiences to ’be able to relate and connect with the characters and issues’. In addition, after watching LaPelle’s Factory production CLOUDCUCKOOLANDERS (LaPelle’s Factory, 2016), a performance that focused on cinematic conventions and, most importantly for us, taboo subjects, we decided that our theatre company should additionally focus on issues that people are often too scared to talk discuss. This new route that we were about to go on ultimately led us to question the name of our theatre company. We felt that the name X-Pose was too unapproachable for a member of the public to express their true opinions and views. Therefore, after discussing a variety of names such as ‘All out’, ‘Limelight’ and ‘Subconscious’, we eventually decided on the name Pushing Boundaries. With this in mind, we decided to rebrand ourselves as a company that focuses on local issues as well as bringing to the forefront taboo subjects.

Pushing Boundaries logo.

With our rebranding in full swing, the group decided that going out into the Lincoln community to gather the opinions of both students and locals would be a great place to understand the issues that affect Lincoln. Through our group’s extensive research, we decided upon four issues that we wanted to hear the Lincoln community’s opinion on: drug/alcohol abuse, club culture, homelessness and unemployment. With this in mind, myself and Catherine Hayes created a questionnaire that we took out into the Lincoln community to understand what issues the Lincoln community were concerned with. Our results surprised us. Nearly all of the questionnaires that were completed stated that homelessness was the key issue that those who lived in Lincoln were concerned with. With this information, our chief writer Alex Marshall began to write a script that incorporated these issues. The research that we conducted within the community led to us adding a major point into our manifesto: ‘we shall do research into the communities that we visit so make every show relevant to each audience’. However, while these matters were indeed taboo subjects, we felt that there was a more significant taboo subject that we could approach within our first play. After discussions about club culture and the safety of women walking home from a night out in Lincoln, we realised that none of us thought about the safety of men. This therefore led to us wanting to talk about the safety of men walking home alone on a night out and the dangers that they faced. While atrocious crimes such as assault and mugging came to our minds, none of us seemed to think about the possibility and seriousness of male rape. This topic grasped our attention as we suddenly realised that this a very serious topic that is rarely talked about within society.

And just like that, we had it. A solid foundation for a play. And with this, Alex wrote Suitcases in the Hallway.

Bibliography

Herman, J.H. (2001) Trauma and Recovery. London: Pandora.

(2016) CLOUDCUCKOOLANDERS [live performance]. Performed by LaPelle’s Factory. Lincoln: Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, January.