The Company That Invented The Portable Pop-Up Theater And Locked Writers In A Room Until They Drafted A Play

It began over a pint in a Bedford pub. Fifty years later, Paines Plough is a theatrical trailblazer. Dedicated to new plays, the company has presented the work of pivotal dramatists such as David Pownall, Sarah Kane, James Graham, Kae Tempest, Mike Bartlett – and more than 300 others. Actors who have gone on the road with the company include Harriet Walter, Peter Capaldi, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw and Andrew Scott. To mark its half-century, the key players remember the company’s fights, firsts and furious creativity.

John Adams (founding artistic director): We all met in Bedford, where I was living, and went for a drink to a pub called the Plough, where the beer was brewed by a St Neots company called Paines, in 1974. A wonderful actor called Chris Crooks had asked the playwright David Pownall to write him a one-man play. Andrew Leigh, the general manager at the Edinburgh Lyceum, said we could use the studio for three performances in the 1975 fringe. The play, Crates on Barrels, was about a disciple of Diogenes the Cynic who lived in a barrel so we drove up to Edinburgh pulling a trailer with an eight-foot barrel: we had to cut it in two to get it into certain places.

One night, there were four people in the audience, one of whom was Irving Wardle who wrote a very good review in the Times. I used that review to sell our next project. We went back in 1976 with Music to Murder By, which won a Fringe First award and you couldn’t get a ticket. It went on the road for 18 months. There would be no Paines Plough without the Edinburgh fringe.

We didn’t have a stage manager and when we arrived at a place, we’d all lump everything out of the Ford Transit. The actor Fiona Victory would do the costumes then had to do her Renaissance hair. Diana Kyle, another actor, would set up the sound and I would do the lighting. The deal was we had to be out of the theatre before the pubs shut at 10.30pm. We were guerrilla theatre.

Donna Franceschild (playwright): Songs for Stray Cats and Other Living Creatures was the 10th anniversary production in 1985. Pip Broughton was the director and it was the most extraordinary cast: Josie Lawrence, who played the lead, John McGlynn, Peter Capaldi, George Rossie and Elaine Collins.

Peter Capaldi was just so funny and had a natural humanity, a genuinely lovely person. He and Elaine got together during the rehearsals. One afternoon before a performance, we were all hanging out in the Tron bar in Glasgow and Elaine’s previous boyfriend came in, found Peter and punched him hard enough to knock him off the chair. Well into the second act, Peter’s character makes a quixotic attempt to beat up another guy. After that happens, he has bruises on his face, but he had the bruises right from the beginning!

Katie Posner (current co-artistic director): The writers Plaines Plough has produced are some of the greatest we have in Britain. We were doing a tidy-up upstairs and we found the second draft of Sarah Kane’s Crave with notes from Vicky Featherstone.

Vicky Featherstone (former artistic director): When I arrived at Paines Plough in 1997, Mark Ravenhill was literary manager and Sarah Kane became writer in residence. Her theory was that no writer ever really wanted to write. She said it was too lonely a business and you had to literally lock them in a space to do it. She came up with the Lock In: six writers would arrive on the Saturday morning and weren’t allowed anything from outside, no phone calls, nothing. We would bring them food, they would write, go home, come in the next day and write again. Only a writer would ever dare to suggest that. Imagine if I suggested taking writers’ phones away and forcing them to write!

Dennis Kelly (playwright): During the Lock In, I wrote the first two acts of Osama the Hero, which I went on to do at Hampstead theatre in 2005, so it was instrumental for me.

VF: Sarah was running our Wild Lunch writers’ group. She wrote Crave in 1998 because the intended play by Rebecca Prichard got picked up by the Royal Court. There was no point in us doing a lunchtime reading of the same play so I asked Sarah if she would write something. She said, “I will, but we need to come up with a title and an idea, then I’ll do it under a pseudonym.”

She thought it would be liberating because she couldn’t imagine writing anything again after Blasted at the Royal Court. We came up with the title together in the pub, then she went off for four days and came back with the first draft of Crave. It happened out of necessity.

DK: I remember going in for a meeting with Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany. I was really surprised to come out as their writer in residence. I said nothing, I just let them carry on talking. By the end of the conversation, they even managed to talk themselves into commissioning my play After the End. It felt like if I’d have kept quiet for a little longer, I’d have got a car.

JA: Because we had no money, I lived in David Pownall’s house sleeping in a cupboard for a year. It was back in the days when you got paid your unemployment benefit irrespective. That system subsidised Paines Plough for the first year or two. We learned the whereabouts of the employment exchanges of northern England, would sign on, then get back on with doing art. We didn’t have to do business plans or applications saying who it would appeal to. We just did the work.

VF: In those days people could be paid to have a bit of time and space just to exist. One of the hard things for artists now is you have to set out what the outcome is before you’ve even said what the idea is.

DK: I didn’t understand what a writer in residence was. I kept thinking, “They’re going to ask me to do something.” They said, “What we want you to do is hang around and just chat.” I kept thinking, “Should I sharpen some pencils or something?”

Somebody Jones (playwright fellow):  I became playwright fellow in 2023 and was much more involved than I expected. As a writer, even if you have a good relationship with a theatre, you feel like you send your play off into the ether. It was so cool being on the other side. And it helps the theatre because you have someone coming in with fresh eyes.

DK: I’d be in the building and Mark Ravenhill had been working next door and I’d be starstruck. People would come in, like Enda Walsh and Abi Morgan, these writers I really looked up to. Being exposed to that makes you feel like you can do it, you can have a go.

SJ: On my first day, everyone was like: “Oh, let me give you some plays to read.” I have a giant stack of plays. It was so important because you can’t know the entire 50-year history of a company. It’s helped in ways I don’t even think they’ve realised.

Charlotte Bennett (current co-artistic director): Part of the company’s survival lies in its innovation. It is in the nature of new stories to find new ways of doing things.

KP: There can always be another way. We don’t sit there going: “This is what you need to do to be the best playwright ever.” We empower writers to be who they are. We like being bespoke.

CB: It is no surprise that we founded the Women’s prize for playwriting with Ellie Keel within our first two months in post. It felt in line with the ethos of the company.

DK: You can develop your voice at Paines Plough. I did After the End and Orphans with director Roxana Silbert and Our Teacher’s a Troll with George Perrin. When I went on to do Matilda the Musical for the RSC and Utopia on Channel 4, the experience of having been able to say the thing I meant to say was invaluable. If you go off and do those TV things straight away, your voice will get battered out of you.

JA: David Pownall, Chris Crooks and I used to go walking together. A lifestyle that said, “Let’s walk in the hills and then put on plays in the evening” was very amenable to us. We were non-metropolitan.

CB: I grew up near Selby, which is not that glamorous. In 2022, we toured Amy Trigg’s Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me to Selby town hall where my friends and I used to go to battle of the bands and get drunk when we were 16. This award-winning play that had a major run in London holds as much weight for us in that space as it would in the West End.

Our predecessors, George Perrin and James Grieve, invented the Roundabout, a 167-seater portable pop-up theatre. You tour the entire venue with the plays in it. You come out and you’re in the Edinburgh festival or you’re in Newington council estate in Ramsgate or a beach in Poole, but you’ve had the same experience. It’s magical.

KB: There is something visceral about seeing everybody around you in the Roundabout and, whether you like the play or not, it doesn’t matter because you’ve done something together. One of my favourite moments was Daniel Kitson’s 2023 play First Thing when he asked the audience to tell the story with him. Every single one of us got a script and a line. It was so special to share something together.

VF: Paines Plough’s mission is incredibly pure – it’s always been about the writer and it’s always peripatetic. The purest missions are the ones that endure because they were created for the right reason.