How can we do the world differently? A conversation about talking with theatre audiences

I’ve been a fan of the PappyShow since early 2019, watching a euphoric performance of Boys at the Brighton Festival. I’d long heard good things about the company – the joyfulness of their work, their spirit of collectivity – but Boys exceeded all anticipation. The show was a laugh-and-cry delight, exuberant, heartfelt and direct, that felt from the audience like being in friendly company with the performers, all young men of Black and Asian backgrounds. I was there to host a Theatre Club at the invitation of Brighton People’s Theatre, who had group tickets and wanted a supported space in which to chat afterwards: most of what I remember about that conversation is a constant stream of marvel, at the skill of the performers and their openness in thinking about public perceptions and expectations of masculinity, black masculinity in particular, and their actual experiences, feelings, dreams.

Fast forward to early 2023: the PappyShow and I are connected again as part of the Moving Roots project, an experiment in touring community-participatory performance. Their show What Do You See? is programmed by two of the Moving Roots partner organisations, Old Courts in Wigan and Restoke in Stoke, and I’m supporting people in both places to write about or from the work. One of those writers, Chandan Shergill, mentioned the post-show conversation, describing it as ‘an affirmative moment, bringing the audience and performers together to share and consider the wider context of what we’d all seen’, adding:

‘Rather than a straightforward Q&A, it was a really open and non-intimidating discussion to consider the issues covered in the show and expand the conversation. After every PappyShow performance the company hold space to unpack and give the audience tools to go home and continue the dialogue – the work is a springboard for that, with Kane even going so far as to say that is the real important part of creating the show, not the show itself.’

Me, on reading: YES! YES!!! ALL OF THAT!!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!

Me, milliseconds later: I have to talk with Kane.

Kane Husbands, that is: founder and artistic director of the PappyShow, also a lecturer at Central Saint Martins and an in-demand movement director for work at high-profile theatres including the National, Sheffield Crucible and Nottingham Playhouse. A busy human: it took a while to get us together, but I was so grateful he gave the time, because he has a clear and inspiring articulation for why dialogue with audiences is important to the PappyShow, and why all theatres should be offering this kind of space all the time. What follows is edited from a much longer conversation: thank you to Kane for letting me move and splice his sentences around.

Maddy: I wanted to talk with you because I’ve been hosting Theatre Clubs since 2012 and it infuriates me how rare this kind of space is in theatre. Inspired by people who work in community settings (Lily Einhorn) or with listening (Rajni Shah), I have my own descriptions of that space: it’s non-hierarchical, rooted in the knowledge that everyone is an expert in their own experience; you don’t have to understand the show but you do get to process it; we’re not here to argue but to listen to different viewpoints; and if you’ve got questions about the show, instead of asking the artists to explain it, we figure out for ourselves what we think the artists were trying to do, and what our response is to that. I’m curious what your approach is to post-show dialogues with audiences and what your journey has been towards that.

Kane: For us it’s been a process getting to this point where we are now. We started with a very traditional Q&A at the end of some performances, and me feeling like I hated sitting in them, hated the questions – who really cares about if you went to drama school? Why are we talking about this crap? And what do we want to talk about? Our work is a bit different because it’s about identity. I’m not wanting to talk about characters or story: I’m wanting to talk about context, or how I’m feeling, or how this relates to the world now. So the Q&A didn’t feel like the right structure for us.

So then we tried having conversations on stage with an audience watching: there’d be some of the cast, and we’d invite some guests, people who might have contributed to the process or a researcher or someone that had a different perspective. We spend two years making a show, our research period is always for quite a long time, really it’s about going out meeting different communities and having a question: what’s it like to be a man today? Or, tell us a little bit about your womanhood? We’ll meet, say, three times a year, set a research question, go off into our different spaces and communities, come back and be like: what have we learned? You get so many perspectives, and the next phase is: how do we develop all of this? How do we respond to everything we’ve learned? We’ll go out with new questions, then begin putting that research into different artistic forms, into poems, into songs, into movement.

We made Shut Up I’m Dreaming with schools that way, through a creative conversation between three schools: one in Sunderland, one in Walsall and one in Wakefield. And then we did a tour with the National Theatre, to something like 65 schools in 12 weeks, and decided to do a half-hour Q&A with the audience after every show. We knew the us and them, audiences asking us questions, didn’t work. So we put the cast in the audience, and there was one person on stage – a facilitator – who would frame it and ask the audience questions that anybody could answer: the cast could answer or an audience member could, and they could ask each other questions. So then everybody is having a chat.

Maddy: I love that! Since 2012 I’ve been hugely influenced by an essay by a Jewish-American writer called Andy Horvitz, advocating ‘horizontal criticism’: he describes it as the artists begin a conversation which the critic picks up and then so do the audience, the discussion continuing to expand outwards. And part of what I’m so passionate about is the possibility that conversations might happen in this post-show space that wouldn’t happen elsewhere. People who wouldn’t attend, for instance, a public discussion about immigration, or get involved in a twitter argument about feminism, can come to Theatre Club and talk about political things, without the environment being rancorous or one of heated debate: the emphasis is on listening and mutual respect.

Kane: When we were working on What Do You See? I saw a quote that said something like: we’ve all watched the exact same thing, but we’ve all understood it very differently. So how did you understand it? That’s the right thing to ask. Tell us what did you understand, and we’ll all see your viewpoint. That’s been the start of all of our discussions ever since, and it feels like now, we want to do it after every show. It feels like that’s what we’re doing the show for, for the discussion. It’s a part of the event. We want to write it in: ‘Come and spend the evening with us, some of it will be you watch something, and some of it will be you talk about something.’

I don’t come from a traditional theatre background, my family aren't interested in it. And when I first made Boys, I just wanted to make something that my mum and dad would be able to understand. It didn’t need to have a story, you didn’t have to follow characters, it didn’t need to make sense, they would just feel things. But they definitely needed a space to be able to talk about it afterwards.

It’s terrifying, isn’t it, putting your viewpoint out there and it being criticised or told that you got it wrong or that you’re stupid. Often when I’m seeing work, I’m thinking: who is this for? I don't feel like that question is being considered enough – therefore, the audience aren’t really thought about when the making is happening. What will they think, or how are we provoking them, or what’s the conversation we want to start in an audience, or what do we want people to talk about? For me, that’s what it’s all about. I think the discussion afterwards is the most interesting thing – more interesting than the play, I think.

It’s like when you do yoga: apparently it’s the 10 minutes at the end, when you’re lying on the floor, that all the learning happens. It’s not when you’re in the poses. When I’m watching a show the learning happens in the reflection afterwards. And if we want to make an impact and change the world or see a better society, it’s actually in the discussion afterwards.

Maddy: We’re doing this work in the society that we’re in though, and there’s always a risk of the discussion being thorny. I’m thinking a lot about a Theatre Club I hosted this year when someone said a lot of harmful things about people who are gender non-conforming. Or there might be a difficult conversation when, for instance, there’s an interaction between a kind of whiteness that maybe sees itself as marginalised, and people marginalised by whiteness. How do you navigate that?

Kane: It’s really hard and we’ve had to really think about who can facilitate that space, because not anybody can. Sometimes I’ve felt like I’ve set the team or my friends up by going, you host this one – but they don’t know how to tread carefully through those difficult conversations and so will move away from it, and you go, ‘nooo, everybody in the room wants us to address what just got said! We can’t ignore what just happened there, or we’ll upset somebody somehow!’

I remember when we were in Jersey (touring What Do You See?), the dialogue just got stuck in this space of talking about, ‘not all white people are racist’ and it was like: I don’t know how we go through trying to explain that when one audience member says white supremacy, they’re not talking about everybody in this audience is that. That’s what prompted us to consider having someone who’s not been a part of the show, that is more of a professor or a researcher or a therapist or somebody who brings a very different knowledge-based skill, in with us.

There’s something in going: look at where the world is now. And we don’t have to have the answers: actually many feelings can exist in a room and we can just voice this and it can feel unfinished. But also, I’ve often thought: if I just sit here now and keep letting this person speak, what harm am I doing? And what care am I doing for the other people in the audience? Who do you look after? I believe we should be caring for our audience, so what does that look like? We have to find ways through because it can’t be that we just separate.

Maddy: This is it. I also think a lot about what the responsibility is of the theatre towards the audience. OK, there are content warnings now, and maybe you can go to an usher and they will give you a number for a helpline, but there’s not an actual structure of care around an audience. In terms of how an audience is held through encountering something that might be difficult to encounter, or what kind of conversation might be needed to mean they don’t go home in a mess of the voices in their own head, it feels like some responsibility is missing around that. And it seems to me that’s something that you’re really interested in considering.

Kane: I really agree. That’s why the tone of our work is always about joy. I don’t want people to go home crying because they’ve just watched Medea kill her kids, I don’t want to leave audiences in that space. I can’t watch any more trauma stories. I can’t watch them any more. I never want the conversation to just be focused on that because it talks about the past. I want us to think about how can we do the world differently? How can we move forwards to a new space? I have to believe that it’s more hopeful than bleak as we go forwards.

Sometimes this means encouraging practising gratitude, even starting the post-show conversation with the cast saying: we’re just going to introduce ourselves and tell you one thing we’re grateful for today. It can set a tone that you see them not as these robots who spout knowledge but as people with feelings. Often they’ll talk about how they were looked after through rehearsals: because our work is about ensemble, you’re watching connection happen. That in itself is joyful.

I’m overt with the politics of the PappyShow, what we stand for and what we don’t stand for. And if we want to have a big impact, we need to see how the work lands, we need to speak to the audience, because otherwise you don’t know what you’ve said or what was understood. What we found in Jersey with What Do You See? is, because we were talking about hard stuff, sometimes it lands and sometimes it doesn’t, and actually the dialogue at the end can close it. With the show you can really be like, I don’t know if the audience were with us, or if we’ve upset everybody – you need to look after your audience a little bit. And I just think, good communication is I offer something and then I wait for the response. It’s like no one cares for the response any more – or if anything does come back it’s viewed as criticism.

A lot of the PappyShow’s work has been inspired by the feedback from the previous shows, and us going, what have we learned from thinking about this, or what do we need to say now? I don’t view feedback as criticism: I view it as, What did you understand? What you took from it, was that actually what I wanted? It’s fine that you got something totally different. But if I wanted to try and communicate joy and you got heartbreak, then it would make me go back to the drawing board and go, that’s not working. We shouldn’t do it in that way. Let’s think of a different way.

If a theatre decided to prioritise care as the value that it was going to programme a season with, it would transform every which way they did everything in that theatre. The way they speak to audiences, the way they include them, the way they send them out after, the way they look after actors: it would be different. They might have to slow down a bit, they might not be able to do as much work or not have as many people in. But it’s not about care really.

Maddy: I feel like, for both of us, the root of this is a commitment to social change. I know with Theatre Club I’m not actually ‘changing the world’, but I talk a lot about how that social change comes – very slowly!! – from enabling people to listen and be in dialogue across difference. It’s a practice towards change. And I’m curious how you articulate that.

Kane: I want to get better at how we do this. One of the performers from Girls, Carolyn Defrin, is doing academic work looking into how we measure impact and is bringing some of that to the PappyShow, to thinking about: how do you measure this work? Because I really do believe it is about change, but we don’t have the tools to talk about it or to show it. The stats don’t humanise or enable people to feel or understand how much change can happen.

Our next piece that we’re in development for is all about healing – we’re calling it healing but it’s not healing in like a Reiki, yoga-y way, it’s more like: when something’s broken, when a community is broken, how do we repair it? Sometimes we focus on what divides us but actually, when the flood happens, we don’t care about who you voted for: when a crisis is going on, we just get stuck in and help each other. So trying to bring everything back to your humanity or your feelings, or the very real things that aren’t about having opinions and getting divided, but where you lean in and try and help. It’s about trying to find what those things are and how we talk about some of that stuff.