Director’s Note – Sound of the Underground
By Debbie Hannan
You can buy the playtext here.
They are not your family; they are your employers. Know your rights. And, crucially, know how much everyone is getting paid – Salome Wagaine. ‘Programme Note’ on Peeled and Portion Substack, March 2022
You better work - Ru Paul, Supermodel, 1993.
Yes Ru, but how?
The current crisis in Britain, in art, in the clubs, is one of work.
Who works, where we’re allowed to work, those paid little for vital work, those who receive bonuses off the backs of others’ work, those who tax our work and use that money for corrupt means, and those whose work isn’t considered any kind of work at all, but more of a frivolous hobby.
When work stops enabling you to live, what then?
We wanted this show, and the process of making it, to be a transformation.
Theatre often talks about progressive change, without enacting it. Making The Sound of the Underground was, instead, a direct action. This meant interrogating every element of labour and articulating what we wanted to change. We wanted it to be fairer. We wanted to work more collectively. We wanted all types of humans to work safely on our show. We want to respect club, drag and working class forms, and not squash ourselves into a middle class dramaturgy. And we wanted to make art that represents these values but also has them sewn through the very muscles of the work.
And we wanted all of it to be really fucking fun.
In real terms, this meant change starting with the paperwork. Activism can also look like a fair budget and an altered contract – and I had to begin in a vulnerable place, with my own role as Director. Travis and I being credited as co-creators was to better reflect our labour. The lines of certain roles in theatre are so often blurred, and job titles are more to denote areas of expertise and pay bands, less than indications of who actually is doing what. So we wanted to expose that from the off, and reflect it in our payment – we are splitting the royalties between us equally. A small change on paper meant a significant change in how we work.
We also created job shares across multiple roles in the company, largely as a response to the need to create better models of working for those with chronic conditions and disability. We paid performers for work that took place before rehearsals. We scheduled in an unusual way that better suited these particular workers. We looked at how we could make sure money made it back to the queer club scene and its makers, so roles from costume to movement to participation were filled with experts from the scene. We ran an artistic process that had agency and autonomy built in. Rosie and Max lead a design process that went beyond reacting to a script, and was more like devising the show visually. We worked collaboratively across all departments. We lost any preciousness about whose lane is what, whilst acknowledging expertise.
And we talked about how much we’re getting paid – and, sometimes painfully, how we felt about that.
This ultimately meant moving our consciousness towards our identities as workers, and letting that be a transformative, empowering shift. Yes, artists, yes, drag performers, yes, technicians, AND also workers with rights. We are not enthusiasts, not hobbyists, and not the very lucky members of a community who need to accept the terms and conditions as punishment for electing to do such a “silly” job. We are workers, who formed a collective, and made our art together for our audience.
We keep on showing our working – including in this playtext. By which I mean we keep exposing the assumed and default ways we make art, so we can build better ones. I’m not saying it was perfect – in fact, we definitely fucked it several times - but we tried, and here are the bones of it for you to take from and improve.
The ask that we put upon the team, from the producer Chris through to our designers, from our entire cast to our Assistant Stage Manager Maddie, from every costume designer to me and Travis too, meant more labour for all of us. It is far easier to work within the machine that’s handed to you – the real work is changing systems, and I want to thank everyone involved for this work. Nothing about this show was the default – everything was a creation, an innovation, an evolution – which isn’t easy, but absolutely is and was and will be the seed for change.
The line where art meet work is a fraught and porous boundary, ripe for exploitation and exclusion. As an artist from a working class background, I know what that costs, and I can see who the industry abandons. But by building a more robust, sustainable way of working, we hope that The Sound of the Underground offers another way.
With thanks those who have influence my thinking about theatre-making as work: the blog posts of Salome Wagaine; the article Theatre Enthusiast or Theatre Worker by Medicore Dave; the A Good Night Out Reading Group; the play Wild Bore by Ursula Martinez, Adrienne Truscott and Zoe Coombs Mar; The TEAM’s “Economic Nutritional Chart”; Stef O’Driscoll, Nessah Muthy, Cat Shoobridge, Chris Sonnex, Matilda Ibini, Sophia Khan, Max Johns, Rosie Elnile and Vinnie Heaven.