A letter to Diana

Beckie Mills, the Projects Co-ordinator at the Almeida Theatre, made a video reply to Diana Quow's original postcard a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, encoding problems meant that the video played entirely in fast-forward, and there was nothing we could do about it.

So, instead of the video, Beckie has sent Diana this letter:


Dear Diana,

I hope you enjoyed watching me in fast forward – sorry about that!

Thanks very much for your video message, and for sharing one of the exercises you do.

My video showed the ‘Happy Mondays’ group which is made up of 16-19 year olds who have been involved with Almeida projects, and now want to come to the theatre on their own. We were doing several different exercises based on Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill, which is a play about gender politics, sexual politics, and subverting expectations.

One of these was a very simple ‘stop’ ‘go’ game, where you have to follow a series of commands (eg, stop when I say stop), and then the second time round, so the opposite (stop when I say go). It’s trickier than it might sound, and is really useful for thinking about breaking free of received patterns of behaviour.

You asked my about challenges in my job.

We’ve just finished a big project working with 75 young people form 2 of our partner schools in Islington, creating a contemporary second half to Cloud Nine, set in 2007 in Islington. (Act One is set in colonial Africa in 1879). One of my biggest challenges on this project has been enabling the participants to explore ideas that are controversial, or conflict with what they might believe, and then be open to creating theatre using this work. As a team, we’ve had to be sensitive to individual opinions, but not afraid to question them.

Some of the views expressed have been conservative, some very liberal on subjects such as:

• Sexuality
• The rights of men and women
• Racism
• Parenthood
• Nationality

The participants (all 75 of them) performed their scenes on the Almeida stage on Tuesday 27th November, to a great reception, especially from the cast of the production.

There’s definitely more territory to mine here, but we made an exciting start.

What are you up to at the moment, Diana? Do you have another song you could teach me?

Best wishes,

Beckie