So here we are. This piece has been a long time coming… but it’s only just beginning.

You can read the official blurb on our productions page. This little blog is to tell you how it came to be and what we’re going to do next.

Sometime last year, on a sweaty midsummer night after a few too many drinks, the idea for 4.3 MILES FROM NOWHERE  was conceived. No going back. Through the cold winter months it fed upon me (and anyone who would listen) and made me feel a bit sick; it all seemed a bit too much to carry. And nine months later the piece is born. Out in the world to be poked, fussed over and worried about. Now it’s time to meet the family who will shape it. Suddenly everything is exciting.

‘The Winter’s Tale’ is a text I have often returned to. Fine Chisel’s name comes from Leontes’ line as he leans towards the statue of his dead wife at the play’s conclusion: ‘What fine chisel could ever yet cut breath?’ I fell in love with that moment, the exact point at which we realise that it is within our power to make a character live, breathe, startle, entertain, from the most unexpected of circumstances. The play is rich and multi-layered. It is Shakespeare at his most intriguing: snatching ideas from folklore and popular song as well as Robert Greene’s ‘Pandosto’. It’s full of wonderfully silly ballads and beautifully touching poetry. And it has a gaping hole in the middle of it; there are sixteen years between acts three and four. The foundations of our piece are laid on the slightly shaky ground of this gap.

But you won’t need to ‘know your Onions’ to enjoy our piece, we hope (Mr Onions compiled a glossary of all of Shakespeare’s works, in case you’ve ever wondered where that phrase comes from). We’re telling a story about five present day teenagers and that’s that. ‘The Winter’s Tale’ is our diving board: we will bounce on it, spring from it, perhaps attempt to cling on to it, but it’s what we manage to do in the air that will make a splash - or not.

It will be a modern day folk tale, of sorts. We have been discussing exactly what the word ‘folk’ means. It’s a very maleable term, but at its heart we think its about passing down stories, often with pastoral roots, that sing to everyone. We knew from the start that we wanted to make a piece that used a larger musical ensemble than we’d previously work with, and to further our exploration of ‘handmade’ theatre craft. There is a huge sphere of influences to be found in balladry, aural storytelling and nature itself.

So what better than to drop a group of city-dwelling, underdressed, over-hormonal teenagers right in the middle of nowhere and try to imagine how they might react?

Describe it in a nutshell? All of these ideas don’t fit into a nutshell. Yet. That’s the joy of devising. And its the fear of devising. This baby can barely even support its own head yet. And we will need to get it potty-trained before too long.

As we begin to play with it, we’d love to know:

What does the term ‘folk’ mean to you?

Twitter - @finechisel

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info@finechisel.co.uk

Yesterday I set out what we hope to provide on this blog: an inclusive, regularly updated insight into Fine Chisel’s workings. But who are Fine Chisel? Our site is being redesigned so it’s gone a little unloved for a while, and there isn’t too much information for anyone new to the company. So here’s a potted history for anyone who’s interested…

Fine Chisel are a small - but growing and evolving - group of theatre makers. We’re storytellers, actors, musicians and composers, directors and choreographers, writers and poets, awkward puppeteers and reluctant producers. That makes it sound like there are loads of us; there aren’t, we just all have a go at many things. The company began as a group of students in Bristol. As students do, that group moved on - to train, to work freelance, to explore new things - but the company was born.

My name is Tom Spencer. I’m a director and writer and, although I try to shake off the control-freak vibes, I suppose you could call Fine Chisel my baby. In 2010 I wrote ‘Firing Blanks’ and brought in Holly Beasley-Garrigan and Robin McLoughlin, first to scratch the show in Bristol and then perform it in full (in Bristol, Oxford, Edinburgh and London - click on ‘productions’ to read more). After this, the company’s HQ moved, with me, from Bristol to the South East. James Hill, a long-term friend and collaborator who wrote and performed the music for ‘Firing Blanks’, is just down the road. As we begin to dip our toes into London and to explore venues and possibilities in the South East (with help and advice from Fiona at Farnham Maltings, amongst others), our fingertips still firmly hold on to the South West. Holly, who is continuing to work with me as a performer, choreographer and general sounding board, is still in Bristol. We wouldn’t have got anywhere without invaluable space and support from Rona, Rod and Pam at the Wickham Theatre, Carrie and Ali at the Tobacco Factory, and Katie at Theatre Bristol.

We make theatre that is driven by characters that intrigue and entice us, whether found in a finished play text or - more often, it seems - somewhere else: a newspaper article, a song lyric, a photograph, a park bench. We get excited by music. We are always looking for new ways to bring music to the centre of our practice without jazz hands ever coming anywhere near. Pumping, grinding, dancing beats - yes, a little; we worked with composer Julian Bradley on ‘Be My Eyes’ and loved it. But folky, earthy, real wooden instruments - that’s the direction we’re moving in. We would like the company to be a vehicle for musicians to experiment with theatre making, and a place where actors are encouraged to pick up instruments.

Robin T Barton wrote in his five-star review of ‘Firing Blanks’ for Broadway Baby that ‘the staging is simple but brilliant, a red anorak becoming actual characters in front of our eyes’. That’s thanks to Tobi Poster of Wattle and Daub Figure Theatre; his workshops changed the way we made that piece and changed the way I view puppetry and object manipulation forever. That’s another thing we’re keen to explore further. And we are always interested to hear from writers. We’d like to bring more voices into our rehearsal room, to share our process and use it as the starting point for new ideas; we want to get away from one-big-show-a-year schedules to lots of smaller works-in-progress that may or may not develop into full productions.

We’re moving into our new rehearsal space next week. It is an incredible, beautiful, unoccupied mansion in my home town of Dorking, Surrey. I honestly don’t know how we blagged it. We’re working on a new piece that will begin its performance life in Edinburgh this summer. I will write a full blog soon about the ideas we’re starting with, but for now here is the 40 words you’ll see in the fringe programme:

A comic tale of growing up and getting lost in the countryside. Dynamic storytelling, featuring poetry, puppetry, movement and a live folk band, from makers of Firing Blanks: ***** ‘simply outstanding’ (All the Festivals). www.finechisel.co.uk

We believe in Edinburgh. There’s been a lot of doom and gloom about the spiralling costs and increased competition at the world’s biggest arts festival. It’s true, it’s bloody expensive. But look at even a very brief list of exciting young companies in the UK - BeltUp, Little Bulb, RashDash, Beartrap, 1927, River People - who have found essential early audiences at the Fringe in recent years. We certainly wouldn’t have been booked by the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden without our successful run at Underbelly. We’re excited to see where this year’s festival might take us.

We are professional and we are amateur. We are professional in the sense that sometimes a few pennies from tickets come our way, although we’ve learnt better than to ever count on that. Every penny we save from crap jobs along the way goes towards making theatre and, hopefully, towards a professionally viable model for creating and performing. We are amateur in the sense that Alison Croggon made clear on her blog recently: ‘Amateur derives from the Latin verb amare, to love. It also signifies a commitment to a vocation that was pursued for its own sake, rather than for the sake of money’. Even if the roughly sketched ‘business plan’ I sometimes come across in a drawer doesn’t quite add up, there isn’t anything else we’d rather be doing. We love it.

I have been longing for a while to make this blog a more regular, more exciting, more involving platform. Young artists all need a place to talk about our work, the art that inspires us and how it reflects - or even affects - the crazy, messy world we live in. Andy Field wrote a simple but potent call-to-arms for theatre makers to write as part of their process on the Guardian blog a while back and I think he’s absolutely right.

It’s tricky though. Many of the blogs we at Fine Chisel enjoy reading are written by reviewers, both ‘professional’ (more on my unease with that word soon) and self-published. The Guardian’s is a great start because it welcomes so many contributors. Alison Croggon’s Theatre Notes manages, from the other side of the world, to say a hell of a lot about a hell of a lot that resonates in the UK. In the last fortnight I have seen two shows thanks to another blog: Dan Rebellato’s Spilled Ink. His response to David Eldridge’s ‘The Knot of the Heart’ transformed a slight itch of mine to see the production into a throbbing need. He labelled Eldridge’s play ‘the most searingly moving new play of the last decade’. That decade is my entire theatre-going experience, and I have had a great number of moving evenings, but it was without doubt a challenging, heartfelt, beautifully-performed piece. And because I enjoy reading Dan’s blog generally, I went to see his own Chekhov in Hell at the Soho last night.

We are not looking to become part-time reviewers and commentators alongside our own work though. I will flag up shows of friends and collaborators, and sing loud and proud about work that excites me (in any medium), but never officially. This blog should be about our process, our audiences (and how to foster and extend them), our ambitions, our influences, our successes and failures. All I’ve done in the past is posted reviews of our productions; this, I know, is not the way to win followers. So let us begin anew. Let’s face the music and blog.

Sounds easy? It still feels like a challenge. Very few people who call themselves artists have the luxury of a regular income from their art. Most of us pull pints, serve coffee, teach, clean or go on the dole to supplement any income from ticket sales, grants or rare commissions. And when we do have the opportunity to work - to dive into the rehearsal room, scatter pages of ideas across floors, walls, windows, to do what we love - rarely does there seem an appropriate moment to break from that energy to copy all of this wonderful process onto the internet.

But that’s what we have to do, I think. Because blogs are no longer (if they ever were) a one-way stream of personal rants. Thanks to twitter and other social media, thoughts are shared more immediately, comments come in more frequently and from more diverse thinkers and makers. So, if used wisely, our scattered thoughts can be spread over the ether for others to comment on and contribute to. We can achieve more and earn a greater understanding of our potential audiences right at the heart of the creative process rather than waiting in dread until opening night.

Early in the year, Daniel Bye wrote an astute and well-timed challenge to theatres to use twitter as a tool for active engagement, rather than yet another ineffective marketing outlet. The Public Reviews ‘hosted’ an impromptu debate about twitter use a few weeks later, on twitter itself, that received some very interesting comments. And Jake Orr from A Younger Theatre (a brilliant concept that is consistently growing) wrote a new post this morning re-invigorating many of the questions being asked by artists, buildings and organisations about whether, or how, to use social media in the theatre.

So, as we get ready to step into the rehearsal room for a new project, joined by collaborators new and old, here is a promise: we will include you. YOU. We want to know whether our ideas intrigue you, excite you, challenge you, bore you… Follow us on twitter, we’ll try to keep that updated more consistently. Read the blog, please, we’ll write something on here as often as we can. Within the next few weeks, our site will be re-designed and made sparkly be the brilliant Jono Lewarne at City Edition Studio (let us know your thoughts on that too, when it comes). Hopefully that will help. I can’t wait…

…So here is an update from Fine Chisel Towers.

After the intoxicating, and unexpected, success of Firing Blanks, winter 2010/11 has been a quiet time of reflection, evaluation, planning and writing.

This week we entered the rehearsal room (thanks to the wonderful local charity the Brigitte Trust for allowing us to use a space in their building) for the first time this year. We are in the early stages of devising a very exciting new piece for 2011.

Check back soon for details on where we will be presenting work-in-progress performances in the Spring, and various ways that you can help/become part of the Fine Chisel team.

See you soon!

Lovely write up from the Helicon Blog. Have a read…

http://heliconbristol.blogspot.com/2010/09/firing-blanks-in-big-city.html

I was asked recently to write a blog for the science section of the Times website. It should be live on there in the next couple of days, but I thought it was worth posting on here as a general background to the play.

Donor conception and ducks. An odd combination of subjects, I admit. Sometimes that’s what it takes though, a new way of looking at things. So that’s where I started. Let’s go back a little further though…

Assisted reproduction rarely leaves the news for long, with debates often reigniting over new research or new policy. Sperm donation is currently facing some serious challenges in the UK. Figures from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the body that regulates fertility treatment and research, put the number of new donors at 396 for 2008 (the most recent statistic). Given that one in six couples struggle to conceive (also an HFEA figure), the gulf between supply and demand is huge.

Therefore, the HFEA are currently undergoing a major review of a number of policies relating to sperm and egg donation. The most hotly contested of these policies is that which controls the compensation that donors can receive. How much are your eggs or sperm worth? How much is a baby worth to longing parents? Clearly there are some questions that can’t possibly be answered by figures. Quite rightly, the HFEA’s review includes public consultation. But for the public to understand exactly what these policies mean we first have to understand their implications.

And so we return to the ducks. As science progresses and success rates for treatments multiply, the human story behind infertility and parenthood remains relatively constant. But how do we start talking about these problems, and to whom? So I wrote a play, about a man who – upon receiving the devastating news that he will not father a child naturally – walks out of a fertility clinic and finds himself on a park bench, overlooking a duck pond. Prompted by the stray teenage girl who shares this bench with him, he begins to tell his story to us – in the audience – the ducks. We don’t pry. We just float, and listen to his honest, intimate tale set over the months of his path to parenthood.

Donor conception is a subject close to my heart. My parents couldn’t conceive naturally (my father went through gruesome chemotherapy in his twenties so their chances were never great). I was born with the assistance of donor sperm, in addition to several rounds of IVF. I was a complicated and extremely expensive baby. My parents took the very brave decision to talk to me about my biological origin as soon as I could understand such things. This was fairly rare in the late 1980s. So for me, it was never a problem. I was special. And there was nothing missing from my family.

Talking recently to other donor conceived young adults, I realised how different some of their lives had been. Those who had been told at a very young age and brought up in at attitude of honesty were, like me, largely content. However, those who had found out later in life with a crushing blow were left with painful holes. The importance of genetic identity is something many of us take for granted.

For anyone facing these issues, the Donor Conception Network (www.dcnetwork.org) offer invaluable support. Through the network, I interviewed many parents, both those who had brought up children conceived with donor sperm and eggs (including my own) and those who were undergoing treatment, or thinking about it. As a young writer, and as a young man, my particular interest was in fathers. What makes a man a man, and a potential parent? Although every story I heard had moments of pain and fear, the end result was always joy. I met some very brave men. These were stories that I felt had to be told.

It’s been an amazing journey, discovering some of what my parents had to go through to get me here, and what many people face every day – the feelings behind the figures. After previews in Bristol and Oxford, and a critically acclaimed run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, my play ‘Firing Blanks’ now comes to London. It runs at the Tristan Bates Theatre, 20^th September – 2^nd October. More information and tickets from www.tristanbatestheatre.co.uk

That’s right, a two-week London transfer of an extended version of Firing Blanks.

20th September - 2nd October

Tristan Bates Theatre, Covent Garden

7:30pm nightly (not Sundays)

Matinee 2:30pm Saturday 2nd October

Tickets and more information are available HERE

I can’t believe we’ve nearly finished! This month has flown by. Please tell your friends to hurry up and catch us whilst they can! Here’s another lovely FIVE STAR review.

WARNING: this one contains a spoiler, so don’t read beyond the first paragraph if you haven’t seen the show.

*****

Performed by the Fine Chisel Theatre Company and written and directed by Tom Spencer ‘Firing Blanks ‘is a new play that treats the serious subject of donor conception from different perspectives. It is a poignant, affecting work that is shot through with moments of humour and sensitivity in equal measure allowing the actors to use their skills in affording the script moments of genuine warmth and compassion that take it to a superior level. It is a simple production but one that strikes a genuine chord of human emotion throughout. Spencer handles his directing duties with strength and an obvious understanding of the actors in how to transfer the heartfelt emotions lying within his script.

The action centres on an accidental encounter between Richard and Kate-Robin McLoughlin and Holly Beasley-Garrigan respectively- at a park bench after Richard has just been informed he is unable to father a child. Kate lends a sympathetic ear and a more realistic perspective. Richard at this juncture seems more concerned about his genealogy and the social minefield he will have to navigate through being infertile. Their meetings remain haphazard but continue over a period of months with personal pasts and future dreams being locked into through flash backs and glimpses of an alternative future.

With her mother dead and never having known her father Kate extols the virtues of the alternatives claiming that the actual DNA is not as important as the love that a child is shown. Richard comes round to this way of thinking and by the end of the play we discover that his wife is indeed pregnant through a sperm donor and he is excited at the prospect of impending fatherhood.

The performances in this play are both simply outstanding. They touch on humour, heartbreak, frustration and anger lending each in turn credibility. There are many occasions of disarming charm and the idea of park bench therapy with only the ducks to bear witness is lachrymose in ideology but beautifully nuanced to garner the work a life of its own. The acoustic guitar soundtrack by James Hill-drifting in and out of the action on stage like a spectral presence- further articulates and directs scenes of its own accord and the closing scene which he features in is a spectacularly warming one. All in all this newborn is handled with tenderness whilst its future looks rosy.

Donor Conception is everywhere this week. Big Sunday Times feature, and now front page of the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/22/fertility-eggs-sperm-donors

I think this makes Firing Blanks so much more important. Policies are changing, policies which govern hundreds of peoples lives, and we need to talk about these things. Maybe we can be a starting point for these conversations?

Here is our wonderful 5 STAR Broadway Baby review in full:

Fertile Territory

Kate is a teenager staring out into the audience and smiling and muttering. A young busker stands in a corner playing his guitar. The set is a single park bench. In the gloom of this Underbelly space my heart sank – I’ve seen a lot of plays in Edinburgh down the years where you’re presented with this kind of spare scenario as you enter. It doesn’t usually bode well for riveting entertainment. I needn’t have worried. Every so often (though maybe not often enough), the Festival unearths a little gem and this piece sparkles as brightly as any I’ve seen.

Enter Richard. He’s wretched, as he’s just been told the terrible news by his doctor that he will be unable to father a child. He gets talking to Kate and from this unlikely alliance we get to explore some incredibly deep themes, most fundamentally of all, what it means to be a man.

And it’s all done with consummate professional skill. Tom Spencer’s short, new script is perfectly paced under his own direction and both actors, Robin McGloughlin and Holly Beasley-Garrigan are superb, though the latter doesn’t quite look young enough to play a teenager. Richard tells Kate that having weighed up the options (surgery that probably won’t work, adoption) he and his wife Amy have decided to go down the path of using a sperm donor. What follows is a series of imaginings about the future, beginning with the moment Richard is handed his baby by a nurse. He looks at it, and realises that it doesn’t and will never look like him. It’s heartbreaking. We’re then taken through other imagined scenarios, culminating in a furious row with his teenage daughter who screams at him ‘You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not even my real dad.’

I’m making this all sound a little bleak; it really isn’t. It’s full of great wit and gags. Kate speculates on what it would be like to find out your biological father was someone who ‘grunted over a cup’, and makes a funny, though insensitive remark about seedless grapes. There’s nothing po-faced about the treatment of the subject matter, and the real strength of the production is its warmth and humanity. The staging is simple but brilliant, a red anorak becoming actual characters in front of our eyes. The guitar music, written and performed by James Hill (the busker) always enhances but never intrudes or tries to cheat our emotions.

I won’t be spoiling it to say there’s a pretty happy resolution. If I have a slight criticism it is that this ending is a little too pat, a bit too easy after all we’ve heard. Kate tells Richard about here own situation with her mother, who clearly resented her existence. It’s this information that allows Richard to move forward and embrace the future.

The day I saw this there were about twelve in the audience. I’ve sat in some packed auditoria for the last three weeks watching some terrible acting, students murdering the classics, directors intellectually wanking off, performers not having a clue what the play they are undertaking is about. All of them should see this play that they might see how simply, if you have the talent, you can make people laugh and cry. And think.

Everyone involved here should be very proud of their new baby.

Robin T Barton