9. The Guildford Shakespeare Company with Matt Pinches

Matt Pinches from the award-winning Guildford Shakespeare Company talks to Anjna about its 15 year journey, and what the future may hold for the charitable organisation. 

Transcript

Anjna Chouhan:

Welcome to Shakespeare Alive, a podcast from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Hello, and welcome to Shakespeare Alive. A podcast that hosts conversations with people who work or engage with Shakespeare from all around the world. My name's Anjna, and in this episode, I'm speaking with Matt Pinches, co-founder of the Guildford Shakespeare Company, which he established with fellow actor, Sarah Gobran back in 2006, with the aspiration to challenge perceptions around Shakespeare and to encourage new ways to experience theatre going. In the 15 years since its inception, the company has staged 44 productions, reached 115,000 audience members, and has more than fulfilled its charitable remit by engaging with over 5,000 people of all ages through its award-winning education programs. In 2019, Matt and Sarah were announced as directors of the year for inclusivity by the prestigious Institute of Directors, the London and South region. Now, having grown up in Worcester, a mere 25 miles away, Matt is very familiar with Stratford and he's joining me now from Guildford. Matt Pinches, hello, and a very warm welcome to Shakespeare Alive.

Matt Pinches:

Thank you very much for having me. It's such an honour. I've loved listening to all the episodes so far.

Anjna Chouhan:

Am I right in thinking that you don't perform in traditional theatre spaces?

Matt Pinches:

No, that's right. So we are a, what you'd probably call, a site responsive theatre company, in that we don't use theatres. Over the years we've used gardens and lakeside settings, castles, stately homes, churches, goodness me. Nearly every church in Guildford, I think, has hosted us at some point. The using of non-theatre spaces is really magical. It's really exciting for audiences, for theatre makers, but also it allows us to tell these stories in completely new, inclusive, and immersive ways. And part of our belief is that if you're going to build structures or a set that it needs to be built into the venue that you're using, as opposed to putting up a stage in front of a stately home, we'll make the stately home the set.

Anjna Chouhan:

And it's interesting that, if you're using places like churches, that you're allowing people to engage with the shows, obviously specifically with Shakespeare, in spaces that they'll be familiar with already.

Matt Pinches:

Well, one of the things that we felt very early on was that Shakespeare still, despite all of the amazing work that theatre companies and television and films do to make Shakespeare more immediate and accessible, he still carries or can carry that misconception or stigma that Shakespeare is something that is perhaps a little beyond me. It's for an educated elite or it's not for me or it's an expensive hobby going to the theatre and seeing Shakespeare. And that's something that we, right at the very beginning, wanted to challenge and to find a new way to encourage people to, not only engage with theatre, but to reinvigorate the way people experience theatre and experience Shakespeare as well. So that was another reason why we wanted to use these non-theatre venues. Because it's, like you say, going into churches or into gardens or stately home or wherever it might be, we're inviting audiences to interact with those spaces as well.

Matt Pinches:

So they're doing two things. They're experiencing Shakespeare and theatre, but they're also experiencing spaces that they probably walk past every day on the way to work. So here in Guildford. They may have lived here for 30 odd years, but they've never been inside Holy Trinity church. But by coming to see Hamlet or Othello or Romeo Juliet in there, they've suddenly engaged with that building, which is part of the fabric of their society, on a completely new level. And so at the same time, it enables and encourages a local pride in an audiences shared society, and practically for those buildings or venues, it enables a continued varied use of those special places. And it helps sustain our collective cultural heritage whilst they also help highlight aspects of the plays that, maybe in a conventional theatre, wouldn't otherwise be perhaps highlighted or thought of and breaks down those barriers.

Anjna Chouhan:

Sure. And I think that's a really important point that you can unpack the plays in exciting ways. And we'll definitely come back to that. I just want to return to the beginnings of the Guildford Shakespeare Company. Can you tell me about how the idea came to be and what challenges you faced along the way when you were setting up?

Matt Pinches:

We were both actors and Sarah had been going to quite a lot of auditions. And here in Guildford, where we were living, she said, "Why haven't Guildford got professional open-air theatre company? Surely it's ripe for the doing?" And I think she will always say the more she thought about it, the more she thought, "If I don't do it, someone else will and I'll kick myself." So she came to me and said, "Will you do this with me?" And in the back of my head I said, "Yeah, of course." And I said to her, "Yeah, we'll do it. Probably only for a year though." We were still jobbing actors for a long time as the company evolved. And at the time I was temping for a marketing agency. We wrote to local people saying, "Will you support us?" Sort of thing.

Matt Pinches:

I think our first budget was something, I think it was 6,000 pounds, 7,000 pounds. And we wrote to a lot of people that we thought would help us. And amazingly some of those people, Kenneth Brannagh, Derek Jacobi, Alec McCowen, wrote back and gave a little donation to help get us get going, which was so incredible. Having those theatre heroes write back to you and put a small check in the post, which meant a huge amount to us at the time, having no money, no way of generating any revenue. It enabled us to get going. So we spent the first five, six years either not working for any money at all and doing it all in our spare time, or a very nominal amount. We're 15 years old this year. It's been an amazing journey, it really has.

Matt Pinches:

And I think we now have 14,000 audience members a year. We employ around about 130 artists a year. So that's actors, directors, designers, stage managers, photographers, filmmakers and all that sort of stuff. In 2015, we had the incredible Brian Blessed come and play King Lear for us, which was just the most amazing experience. And we had to pinch ourselves that we got to this stage, that's this giant of the theatre world, in all respects, joined us. And that came about because we did Othello in 2014 and Brian's daughter played Amelia, and Brian came along and absolutely loved the show. It was in a big church. We set it in the 1950s in the cold war. And also Kenneth Brannagh came to see that. And that was the first time he'd been to see the show since... We'd stayed in touch with him over the years and let him know how his support in that very first year had been helping out.

Matt Pinches:

And then when he came to see it, came to see one of our shows, again, it was one of those star dust moments going, "Oh my goodness, this is real." And I thanked him afterwards for his support. And he remembered and said... I played Cassio in that. He said, "Cassio was my first part in Shakespeare when I was at Redding Youth Theatre." And I'm glad he didn't tell me that beforehand. But yeah. And then Brian, he loved the company and said, when we started talking to him about King Lear, and it went from there. And so all these little steps taking us in the direction to where we are now.

Anjna Chouhan:

That is wonderful, Matt. What a journey. So you've got the company up and running. We're 15 years in, and then suddenly there's a global pandemic that hits. Can you tell me a little bit about what happened to Guildford Shakespeare Company and what your activity was like in 2020?

Matt Pinches:

We were quite adamant at the very beginning that what we didn't want to do was just announce a fundraising campaign, please help us to stay afloat. We hoped it would be more beneficial to our audiences, to the community, to the artists, to us, if we tried to make work and still find a way to charge for it so we generate some revenue. So over the course of the year, we have six live online shows we've developed.

Matt Pinches:

And then the other key part of our work was our education and outreach work. One of the large parts of our education work is working with people who are already socially isolated. So whether those are people in care homes or whether that's people who are living with mental health conditions, or their families, they're going to be even more isolated. So we really wanted to continue a lot of that work as well, as much as we possibly could. So the whole year has been about rethinking, re-imagining. There's been a lot of great successes, a lot of great developments. I would never wish to repeat it. I think we're all rather exhausted because it's just been quite relentless.

Anjna Chouhan:

Yeah. You certainly had a very, very busy year. I think your ambition and aspiration to share, whether it's Shakespeare or theatre or art in general, I think you've really lived up to that. That was manifested in the fact that you were able to receive part of the Cultural Recovery Fund back in October, 2020. So there's obviously lots of work that that will enable you, and has already enabled you, to do and to start planning. Can you give us an idea of what's coming, what's on the agenda in as much you can know at the moment, Matt?

Matt Pinches:

Yeah. That's the tricky thing. I mean, yes. I mean the Cultural Recovery Fund, that investment from the government was a lifeline to us and to so many organisations, purely to keep going. Not to create new work, but simply to pay the bills and keep a roof over our heads and stuff. But we are in the process of a new murder mystery called the Verona Lounge, which is a 1950s West End criminal underworld type of setting. Detective Dan Dromio, and there's Tony and Seb, who are the Frays. So Antonio and Sebastian are the Fray twins. So, all of our murder mysteries we tried to link back to Shakespeare in some way in the murder mystery, so that Shakespeare characters or certain deaths and things, are inspired by Shakespeare.

Matt Pinches:

So to be honest with you, Anjna, it is a bit of a crystal ball gaze at the moment of knowing what is going to be possible. We will be in the open air with something in the summer. It is our 15th year after all. And we did have lots of lovely plans, but that is the situation at the moment is that we took the view that if we keep announcing things and our hopes and dreams, and then you've got to postpone them, and then you've got to disappoint people. And it's just a really tough call from an energy point of view.

Anjna Chouhan:

It certainly is. I can imagine. And actually on your website, when it comes to the What's On page, you've got a beautiful way of phrasing your activity to the public, which is that we've taken the decision to only announce projects that we can really commit to. And I think that's just such a wonderful way of putting it and telling everybody the truth. And I think that must've been quite a tough thing to do, but your audiences and your fans will understand as soon as they read that.

Matt Pinches:

Thank you so much for saying that. It's such a kind, generous thing to say. But our communications with our audiences and whether they're your archive audiences, your museum audiences at the Birthplace Trust, or whether you're theatre audiences, those are the people who keep us alive and they're the reasons that we're here. And so we've got to ensure that we stay with them as close as we possibly can. We don't want to disappoint them, but at the same time we have to do what's right for us, so that there is a Guildford Shakespeare Company at the end of 2021, and there is a Birthplace Trust for the future. And I think one thing that we've learned over 15 years here is how important that your core base, your local audience, they're the people who... They communicate with us a lot on a very one-to-one basis.

Matt Pinches:

And they feel a sense of ownership of Guildford Shakespeare Company, but it's how you communicate with them and what you give them back and how you have a transparency and a commitment to them, that you will... People have bought annual passes for the whole year. And they still have at Christmas for Christmas presents just gone. So it's how do you ensure that they understand what you're trying to do to keep going, and you've got to try and fulfill your commitments to them. And I think the work that the education team have done is also part of that.

Matt Pinches:

We've had so many wonderful emails from families and parents who've said, "Thank you so much for keeping the Saturday drama clubs going or the after school, primary schools going and things like that, because it's given my child something to look forward to, to believe in, to commit, to have a project to work toward, whether it's an online performance at the end of the term, or whether it's the mentoring scheme that we do with the young company." The work of Fran, our education and outreach operations manager, and Ant, the head of development for education outreach, and Indiana, our assistant producer, they've done such incredible work to keep those.

Matt Pinches:

We normally work with around 5,000 young people and older people every year. So it's been a real challenge for them, but again, it's part of that commitment to our audiences, and communicating it to them, and staying with them. And I hope we'll see us through. We have a program called Brave New World, which starts in 2018 as a series of programs with three project. So whether that's working with the care home, whether it's touring shows to some of the least advantaged schools in this area, or our mental health project for excluded teenagers and their family. We have an expertise and we feel an obligation to try and fill that gap. I'm in awe of what our team has achieved this year and their unflagging dedication has our utmost respect, Sarah and mine.

Anjna Chouhan:

Wow. I'm sure that they appreciate that and work with the dedication and love that both you and Sarah have for the company as well. Let's pause for a quick break.

Paul Edmondson:

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is the charity that promotes the life, work, and times of William Shakespeare in his hometown of Stratford upon Avon. We look after the five houses associated with Shakespeare and his family. We make freely available an internationally important library, archive and museum collection. We lead new research and we run an award-winning education program. In light of this podcast, please consider making us a donation. You can do this by visiting shakespeare.org.uk forward slash podcast support. Your support and good will really matter to us. And we hope you'll recommend our podcast to your friends.

Anjna Chouhan:

You're listening to Shakespeare Alive and I'm talking to Matt Pinches from the Guildford Shakespeare Company. Shall we talk about Shakespeare, Matt?

Matt Pinches:

Oh, go on then. I thought we have been!

Anjna Chouhan:

I know it's a bit radical. I mean, obviously I usually ask people what their route to Shakespeare was, but if it's okay, I'm just going to tweak that a little bit in this case and ask why Shakespeare for you? Because obviously your company takes Shakespeare as it's raison d'etre.

Matt Pinches:

I suppose in part, for me, the reasons I've already said about what we tried to do with Guildford Shakespeare Company is because I was one of those people who thought it was beyond me. I've worked it out. It was 30 years ago this year was my first encounter with Shakespeare. I was in my third year at secondary school and I was asked by a fifth former who was doing drama for her exam, would we do act one, scene seven of Macbeth. And I was just blown away. I liken it, I still liken it to an archaeology that you slowly brush away the layers of these words of these speeches. And suddenly it's not foreign language anymore. And actually, he says much more complex things in a much more simple way than you imagine. And then a year later I did Taming of the Shrew for my GCSE.

Matt Pinches:

We went to see an RSC production, and this is going to sound awful, but I was so bored. It sounds terrible and I'm so sorry but I suppose I was 15. I was going, "This isn't speaking to me." And then a couple years later I was doing my A levels and I did Hamlet and Winter's Tale. And we saw a lot of those productions and a lot of different productions. And I then went back to the RSC to see the Taming of the Shrew. And my mind was blown once again, that this very same play that I'd seen a few years before, three years before, now was utterly different. I was transfixed. It was the same words and the same characters. It was Josie Lawrence and Michael Siberry in Gale Edwards production. And it was irreverent and it was bright and big and bold and funny and exciting.

Matt Pinches:

And I absolutely loved it. I remember that year, the '94, '95 season, I learned to pass my driving test and I had my little Mini Metro, and I think I saw every show in that season to Stratford. And I used to go there on my little homage. In the Dirty Duck they would have, under a cloche, they'd have cold sausages. And I'd have a cold sausage and I was underage and I was driving, so I think I used to drink milk. Milk and a cold sausage in the Dirty Duck with all these actors’ photos around me and I'd go, "Wow, what an exciting world." I suppose that's where it came from. There's a reason Shakespeare's lasted 400 years and it's because we can remake him, remould him into whatever we need him and his words and his characters and their situations to be.

Anjna Chouhan:

Well, I'd absolutely agree with that. And talking about repurposing and remoulding Shakespeare, I'm interested in what you had to say earlier about the fact that Shakespeare changes depending on the space that you've ended up staging him in, whether it's a stately home, whether it's a park, whether it's... Suddenly I've lost all my words.

Matt Pinches:

Church

Anjna Chuhan:
Yes. Whether it's a church. Thank you. So how has that manifested itself, Matt? What sorts of things have you encountered?

Matt Pinches:

For one thing, it puts the audience in the same space as the actor. Hamlet, when we did that in the church, when Hamlet comes down and says, "Am I a coward? Who calls me this?" The fact he sat down on the edge of the steps on the stage and sat with the audience and asked that question, because they were less than a meter away. Suddenly you ask one person that, next to you, sat there. You're asking all 200 people in the room the same question. But then when you've got this, to be or not to be speech, and you're talking about heaven and hell, and above you is this giant rood screen with a wrought iron cross on it, and below you is hell if you like. But the audience are in a building where you've not built a wooden cross to make it look like part of a church, you are in a church.

Matt Pinches:

So when Claudius is praying for forgiveness and Hamlet stumbles upon him, it's so much more real. And in 2019, we did Measure for Measure in the church. And we did a gender-swapped production at the interval. So we played the show with a, I remember this [inaudible 00:20:33]. We played the show with the gender swap at the beginning. So Angelo was a woman and Isabella was a man, but also some of the other... The Duke was a woman and six of the characters then gender-swapped at the interval and played it, call it, the traditional way. And we had the audience around cabaret-type tables, and we asked them to write their thoughts on the tables. Each table, over the course of the run, builds up this massive tapestry of this response to Measure for Measure. But again, a play that is so heavily set within a religious context for those characters.

Matt Pinches:

It was fascinating to be able to play that in that space. And where we've done Macbeth in there a couple of times, and originally we wondered if the church would be okay with it. And they said  actually "as long as you don't put a cauldron on the altar, we're fine!" If you're in the open air and you've got a lot more references to flowers, nature. Benedick talks about being an oak you couldn't move when Beatrice is having a go at him in the masked ball. But we played that underneath a giant oak tree. So the sense that the line isn't a premeditated poetic line, Benedick is underneath an oak tree and is able to... An oak, but with one green leaf on it would have answered her. So straight away that immediacy of the world. We can do all sorts of wonderful things as well in the open air, because we've had motor cars, boats.

Anjna Chouhan:

You've had boats?

Matt Pinches:

Well, that great anachronistic in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Proteus and Launce go to Milan by boat from Verona, which is a very long way round Italy to get to Milan. But, as they do, we were doing it on a lake. And so we had a rowing boat. So I played Launce and an actor playing Proteus went behind a bush, bit of action, and then we're rowing out across the lake on our way to Milan and with Julia waving us off and stuff. So you just get to explode the world in a whole different way. And in the open air, if it rains, it rains on the actors, it rains on the audience. And again, it's about that sharing. From that point of view, it opens up Shakespeare and it makes it less daunting and more real.

Anjna Chouhan:

So let's talk about the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust now. I know that you have been to visit us, but you have walked from Stratford to London, which I'm sure was an extraordinary experience. So thinking of Stratford, which of our houses do you see yourself living in?

Matt Pinches:

I'd love to say New Place, because I just think that ambition, as a little boy, Shakespeare, going to school past that big house every day, and then one day owning it. There's a house just outside of Worcester, which, as a little boy, I was always fascinated by and I'll live there one day. When I drive back and we go past it, I still have a good look at it and it's a beautiful Elizabethan house. And I wonder if Shakespeare had that same thought and then one day he went, "Yep. I'm going to buy it."

Anjna Chouhan:

Is there anything within our collections that stands out for you?

Matt Pinches:

One of the things I'm most fascinated about, about Shakespeare, is him and his world. Therefore looking at the world he inhabited, and the people he would have met, and the people his family would have met and interacted with, and the people in the street who would have known him. I find that utterly fascinating. And as a amateur historian, I would love to take and have a really good read through. It's quite a long title in your archive, but it's the composite register of baptisms marriages and burials. Because that is from the beginning of his life to the end of his life. That's everybody that he would have come into contact with, or his family would have come into contact with, who would have known him. That places him in reality for me.

Matt Pinches:

And again, takes him off that pedestal and brings him back to reality to the people who cleaned out the streets, to the butcher, the baker, to the local high sheriffs and so on. It places him in a context. And that I find invaluable because, at the end of the day, he's an artist and all artists are inspired by the world around them and their upbringing. And to me, that's where Petruchio is, that's where Katharina is, that's where Benedick and Beatrice are. They're probably in that book somewhere.

Anjna Chouhan:

So when it comes to things that we ought to be collecting, or that you would think we ought to be collecting for future generations to enjoy, is there anything that comes to mind for you, Matt?

Matt Pinches:

So you mentioned that in 2016, I walked from Stratford to the Globe and I followed the Shakespeare Way, which is a walk that was created in 2006. It follows a hypothetical, but as near as possible, route that Shakespeare may have taken from Stratford on his various comings and goings to London. And in 2016, we were 10 years old and we began a campaign to raise money to find ourselves a building that would have rehearsal space, storage space, offices, education space, and so on. And so as part of that year, I did a fundraising walk and I documented it in a film. I was on a handheld GoPro and very kindly the Birthplace Trust allowed me to film for four hours before the place opened, in the Birthplace, to get some early footage of Shakespeare.

Matt Pinches:

And that's where I met you, Anjna, and you are featured on the film and it's a 50 minute film, and it just details the walk, but also the things that possibly Shakespeare would have incurred on that walk. So whether it was what was travel and transport like, where would you have stayed, what were the inns like, the pubs, the taverns? I get to go into the painted room in Oxford, which is looked after by the Oxford Preservation Trust, which isn't open to the public. Talking about traveling players and seeing how the landscape changes, through the Cotswolds into the Chilton Hills. And so I am very honoured that you're accepting the film as part of the archive.

Anjna Chouhan:

Yeah. It's an absolute pleasure to be able to accession that. We've begun the formal process. So many, many thanks for that wonderful, quite literal, contribution and what an extraordinary thing to do. Do you think that you'll ever do the Shakespeare Way again?

Matt Pinches:

I don't know. Maybe it'll be interesting to go the other way. I think one thing I would probably do, if I did it differently, is I would take more time over it. I gave myself nine days, but I met some fascinating people on that walk. And again, this is one of those [inaudible 00:27:42] people say, "Oh, Shakespeare couldn't have written these plays. He's never been to Venice. He's never met an ambassador from Morocco. How is he ever going to know who these people are?"

Matt Pinches:

But on my walk, I met a family who the wife was from the Punjab and the father was from another part of Southern India. And they put me up for the night. And in their house I met a German student and two girls who were on work experience at Pinewood Studios. And I met a person from Australia and I got to walk around Ditchfield Manor, where there are little skulls on the wall of deer that James the first had killed. And I didn't know any of those things, but I now could tell you a story about not sitting in a policeman's seat at the cricket in Sri Lanka. I don't need to have gone to Sri Lanka to have known those things. And again, so there's very real practical things made Shakespeare become much more alive to me. Going, why couldn't he have written about Venice? That's probably why he takes a boat from Verona to Milan.

Anjna Chouhan:

Okay, exactly. But what a wonderful experience. And I hope that you do get to do it, whichever direction it's in. But it's been such a pleasure to speak with you, Matt. Thank you so much for joining us on Shakespeare Alive. And can we wish you all the very best for Guildford Shakespeare Company in the future.

Matt Pinches:

Thank you very much. It's been an absolute honour to be with you. Thank you.

Anjna Chouhan:

Now, if you could deposit something, what would it be? In our previous theories our guests suggested diaries, alternative voices and artwork, celebrating Shakespeare and pride. But now it's your turn. What would you like to see in our imaginary hoard to celebrate Shakespeare in the 21st century? Please let us know by going to shakespeare.org.uk/ future. And while you're there, please consider completing our short survey so that we can make more of the content that you like.

Paul Edmondson:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Shakespeare Alive with Anjna.  Join me next week when I'll be talking to Professor Carol Rutter, of the University of Warwick, about her work on Shakespeare with a special focus on Antony and Cleopatra.