Tim Nunn

The world lost a substantial amount of colour with the death of Ken Campbell. A bit of sadness today. Here’s a pic I took of him a few years ago. The most stately eyebrows on the planet.

Just under a month to the start of rehearsal of ‘Hannah and Harvey’. Eek. The draft of the script for the start of rehearsal is nearly ready, artwork is coming in for the projections, welding and hammering is about to start on the set, music has been written and more auditory magic is on its way. I love this moment on any show. I’ve always maintained to students that in the course of creativity decisions are as important, if not more important, than ideas. Ideas are two-a-penny to the artist - it’s what you do with them that matters. And now is the time for many, many, decisions.

The really great thing at this very moment is that I’ve just seen who Hannah is. It’s that realisation of seeing a character taking life and coming off the page. My hope is that there is enough space for Katherine, the director, and Romana, that actor, to create a ‘Hannah’ of their own and I don’t think the words are too prescriptive. But she also has a strength and identity of her own.

Back to work. Things to do.

P.S. Have a look at the video trailer. It’s brilliant! -

I’ve been working with a group of students at Williamwood High School on the history of slavery in Scotland using photography. The students took photographs at Greenbank House in East Renfrewshire and at what is now the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, but what was once the mansion of one of the tobacco barons who supported the slave trade. These photographs were then combined with archive drawings and etchings from the slave trade era.

The object of the project was to put back the history of the slave trade at the locations where it should be most felt - at the historic homes of those who became wealthy at the cost of immense suffering.

A small selection of the incredible work done by the students is below. I am now continuing with the project to organise an exhibition and launch event at the Eastwood Park Theatre in East Renfrewshire for September 2008.

The project was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

‘How small a thought it takes to fill someone’s whole life’ - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Fill

* [Start Slide Show] *

©Reeling & Writhing

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‘Fill’ was a Reeling & Writhing collaboration between:
Brian Hartley, Gillian Lees, Katherine Morley, Tim Nunn, Suhayl Saadi and Vanessa Smith.

We took the above quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein as our starting point. Through a series of creative meetings we eventually met in a white box for improvised movement with textual stimulus from Suhayl while I took photographs from a fixed point and Brian captured with pencil and ink.

(Unfortunately Gillian was unable to take part in this session so her part was taken by Katherine.)

‘Fill’ was shown as a series of thirty images at the Tron Theatre in October 2004.

Limited number print series from ‘Fill’ are available. Please email me for details.

… The title of this modest 80 minute piece might be said to be misleading given the substantial role for a stuffed sheep called Fenella – clearly not a man. But really it is about a father and son and how they dealt with the premature loss of their wife/mother.

It opens with the son arriving in a remote corner of Ardnamurchan where his father had been a crofter, clutching the urn which holds his father’s ashes. The father duly appears, at much the same age as the son is now, and they chew over the sorts of things that fathers and sons really ought to talk about more but rarely do until one or other of them is dead: how the son became a photographer because of his father’s hobby; why the son stayed in Glasgow when his father went to work the croft and why he wants to come back there now; how the father was content in the wind and rain and the hard labour of surviving off the land in the far west of the Highlands, before the telephone and even electricity had found its way down the long Ardnamurchan peninsula. …

It could have been grimly drab, or portentously lyrical. But Nunn shows once again what a skillful writer he is because his script is witty, tender, and full of interest. Involving the composer Eddie McGuire was also a key move. His series of pieces for solo flutes of various sizes (very well played by Katie Punter) punctuate, comment on, animate and even argue with the two men.

Callum Cuthbertson and James McAnerney, as son and father, respectively respond well to Katherine Morley’s unfussy direction. …

Robert Dawson Scott

There’s a moment of theatre from years ago that I have since realised was the stimulus for me seeking a life in theatre. I’d been keen on drama at school and had a part-time job backstage at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds while I was doing my ‘A’ levels. But it was when I moved to London that I started to see the sort of theatre that I hadn’t the opportunity to see in Suffolk.

In 1986 I saw the double bill of ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ and ‘Endgame’ by Samuel Beckett at the Riverside Studios. It was the former of these that was to have an enormous impact on me and open my eyes to an intimate experience of theatre that I hadn’t realised was possible. I was lucky enough to have a seat in the middle and just one or two rows from the front to see Max Wall’s Krapp. From the first moment with the banana he was absolutely captivating, entertaining, funny and, at the same time, performing with an intelligence that was daunting. Max Wall had a face that could hold an audience without need of words or action and he used its plasticity to full effect without cheapening the text or going for easy laughs.

That performance was as close to perfection as I have ever seen, and suspect I will ever see. I wanted to see it again and again but the run had long sold out and I never did. Perhaps it’s just as well as I’ve since learnt that attempts to repeat such special moments have the potential to ruin the memory of the first. Maybe I would have learnt something of how he achieved such a special thing if I’d seen it a few times, but would that add to the value of seeing it that first time and forgetting to breathe while he was performing?

Max Wall died in 1990 and I remember my stomach lurching when I heard. Somehow I thought he would exist forever. About six months after the show I had seen him in a dark and scruffy pub in South London. He looked old and frail but he was part of the architecture and, therefore, permanent.

A postscipt on this is that twelve years later I was having dinner with some friends including an artist whose work I admire a great deal. One of those dinner party games was introduced for everyone to name a piece of art or moment that had been the most influential to them. I sat there armed to tell the story of Max Wall at the Riverside Studios but, before me, the above mentioned artist started to tell exactly the same tale. Later we worked out we had probably sat only a few seats apart, although the chances are on different nights. Each of us had the same passion for what had happened to us at that show.

So, now I make theatre, in search of another night like that one with Max Wall.

April 2008. I’m in the Stables flat of the Cromarty Arts Trust writing the script for ‘Hannah and Harvey‘. I have to confess to having spent a few days trying to think through some story problems but now I’m getting there. While I’ve been in the North of Scotland my niece Helen has been in Bath, South-ish England, also working on ‘Hannah and Harvey’ and thinking through some illustration problems. So Helen sent me this cartoon:

Thankfully we’ve both got past the head scratching stage and ‘Hannah and Harvey‘ is going to be awesome (even if we do say so ourselves).

When asked about ‘Only the Men’ I have often said that the idea for the show was born when I visited the village of Sanna in Ardnamurchan on the west coast of Scotland. What is nearer the truth is that the show is the story I needed to tell about my own family, the small farm my father owned and my urge to get off the land as quickly as I could. And the feelings I now have about why that happened.

When I was a child my father often told me that I should ‘get a job in a bank’ and never once gave me even a hint that my future should be working on the land. This was from a man who loved birds, would scour through the pages of the expensive bird books he had saved to buy for interesting facts, would lie on his stomach in a damp woodland photographing a rare mushroom and would never be happier anywhere other than in the middle of a loch with his old fishing rod. But according to him working the land just wasn’t an option for anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together.

When I had put on a few years I learnt that my father was sad. The death of my sister had shaped my father’s emotions as well as my family. My closest brother and I had been born after her death when the local GP had advised my father that the best thing would be to give my mother another baby as soon as possible. My father never stopped mourning even though we arrived. The family home and the small farm that went with it were sold when Dad finally admitted that he couldn’t live there any more. My sister had died on the road outside the house, hit by a lorry full of rubble.

Adulthood also opened my eyes to the way Dad liked to be alone. And that he was one of the gentlest people I have ever met in my life and ever likely to meet (and I used to work for the Dalai Lama!). I don’t know whether Dad spent so much time alone before Sally’s death but it certainly fitted his general demeanour afterwards.

In my middle age I have felt an attraction back to the rural. I live in the city and enjoy that life but I can feel my shoulders drop with relief when I get into the green open space and my head is once again turned by bird song. The trouble is that I no longer feel that I am ‘from the country’. It is a different language but one I recognise from my childhood.

When I went to Sanna I saw the places of my childhood in the surreal but beautiful geography. The wildlife and the wind were familiar. It was a shock. The evident history gave this reaction a greater resonance. The beautiful sands of Sanna Bay are surrounded by some new homes but even more ruins of old crofts. Some of the new homes have a shadow of an abandoned stone house. When the stone was usurped by concrete the old houses have been left standing, right next to the door of the new home. History ever present. Sanna is a beautiful natural place but it has a sadness that the humans brought with them and left hanging around after when they left.

When I became resolved to write a play set in Sanna I went back for a longer period, several in fact. I set out to meet residents of Sanna and to hear as much of the first-hand history as I could. The story that then unfolded wasn’t a surprise but it came at me with some force. That Sanna was never a place that people should have lived and that it was inevitable that they have left. That the village grew from the clearances and the injustice of that period was finally brought to its conclusion when the last crofter finally gave up and left in 1970s. My father’s voice telling me to get off the land bounced around my head a great deal when I did this research.

There is a modern truth for Sanna that is not necessarily defined by its history. The village now has electricity, telephone, internet, roads and potential of some tourist income. I understand that there is some contention about the modern development of Sanna but my own personal belief is that if people want to live there they should be allowed to change the crofts to accommodate their needs, work the land as efficiently as possible and develop into a real community. But that was not the truth in the 1970s when life was very hard, almost as hard as it had been 100 years earlier, and the outside world had changed.

In all of this I saw the story of a family that had mixed motives for staying on the land, was rejecting it but at the same time could not leave its isolation. A father and son who both felt the inherited attraction of Sanna but who had both rejected it when they were no more than children and had gone to Glasgow. They were Glaswegians on the surface but Sanna was still in their fabric.

That was my starting point for ‘Only the Men’. If you saw our production I hope you enjoyed it.

In January 2008 I was one of the two directors of the first ‘Artist as Leader’ Lab. The project has been running for a couple of years, produced by the Cultural Enterprise Office, PAL (Performing Arts Laboratory) and On The Edge (Robert Gordon University Aberdeen) and in association with The Scottish Leadership Foundation. It is an examination of how artists can lead ‘through their practice’, and by that I mean their art or the process of making their art. And by that I mean artists just being artists and nothing else. This is a potentially complex idea that when discussed always raises questions of the identity of art, artists and leadership. However, whenever I talk about it to anyone there is always a great deal of interest in the subject - followed by the question of whether artists can or should be leaders. Ultimately, I think, it is about the value of art and artists in the communities and society in which we live.

So, in January we had a ‘lab’ where we brought together some leaders of cultural organisations and some artists to explore the idea using their own challenges and goals as fuel.

Participants were:
Roanne Dods (Director Jerwood Foundation)
Matt Hulse (Film-maker)
Jackie Kay (Poet)
Kirsten Lloyd (Curator, Programme Director Stills Gallery Edinburgh)
James Marriot (Sculptor, Eco-Artist, Activist)
Lucy Mason (Scottish Government)
Janice Parker (Choreographer)
Gill Robertson (Artistic Director Catherine Wheels Theatre Company)
Angela Saunders (Scottish Government)
Andrew Senior (British Council)
Jim Tough (Chief Executive Scottish Arts Council)
John Wallace (Director Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama)
And some visitors or ‘provocateurs’:
Bob Last (film producer)
Graham Leicester (International Futures Forum)
Francis McKee (curator, writer and Director Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow)
Philip Schlesinger (Glasgow University) and
Tom Shakespeare (sociologist, writer, artist)

My Co-Director in the project is Professor Anne Douglas from On The Edge. Also at the lab were Deborah Keogh (CEO), Susan Benn (PAL) and Zoe Van Zwanenberg (SLF).

The lab dealt with cultural leadership and, at the start at least, with policy level leadership. By all of us flexing our own challenges, but maintaining a positive environment for finding solutions, we leapt straight into an arena where a great deal was built very quickly. Big ideas were born and resolutions were made for those ideas to be pursued and developed.

In June the lab participants will meet again to see where the ideas have gone and matured. We will also be developing the central principles of ‘leading through practice’ and ‘artistic leadership’.

When I am applying myself to these principles I inevitably carry a very wide model of leadership that extends from influencing through ideas via team/transferable power models to charismatic front-line leadership. By applying this spectrum of leadership models it is easier to encompass the many and different ways in which art can become part of a process of change, perhaps even not under the control or assertion of the artist. An important, and practical, example for this is how this thinking may influence the inclusion of artists in community or government consultations through their art. My experience is that the most interesting material for a consultation process may well come from the artists who are not pushing themselves forward as advocates of change but who create work they can only see as personal.

There is a great danger with this work that it can lead into justifying the notion that artists have a different way of doing things derived from some special powers or ‘guru’ potential. I have a reticence in believing that artists have any special qualities to bring to leadership that cannot be found elsewhere. However I do think there is a great potential for organisations and government to engage with art and artists in a different way and there is a great deal for the artists to gain in the process.

One word about the venue for the lab - Hospitalfields Residential Arts Centre in Arbroath. What a fantastic place! Set in a bit of woodland with the sea visible through the trees, a rambling house with places to meet and places to hide. It couldn’t have been better. The picture is of the lab participants doing a litter collection around the woodland at the end of the week.

I will write more here about the ‘Artist as Leader’ work as it progresses and develops.

From January to June 2007 I was resident at the Mearns Castle High School, East Renfrewshire, joined in March by Katherine Morley. We ran workshops with a group of 13 year-olds to research the heritage of the area and create a permanent installation for the entrance foyer of the school. The final installation was unveiled on 3 September 2007.
Each of the small boxes was the work of a pair or an individual student. They were compositions of new and archive photographs and text. The text varied from new writing to words from research, Victorian poetry to newspaper reports. The text became part of the graphic composition.
The big box is an imaginary meeting of figures found in the local library archive together with students and teachers from Mearns Castle High School and the primary schools that feed it. The landscape they are standing in is the view from the entrance of the school.