The Scar: Secrets of the Verdant Isle with People’s Theatre Collective

Photography by Rosy Addison-Dunne

We did it! After five months of ideas, conversations, experiments, rehearsals, rewrites, making, unmaking and making again, The Scar: Secrets of the Verdant Isle, the first entirely co-created play by People's Theatre Collective finally made it to the stage at The Mill Arts Centre in Banbury.

Part of the Collective’s new two year project ‘Revolutions’ funded by Arts Council England, The Scar has been a real experiment in co-creation. Rather than arriving with a play and asking young people to perform it, we started with them. We came up with the ideas together, built the world together and gradually worked out what the play needed to become.

At times it was challenging. Working in a co-creative way means everyone giving up the certainty that usually comes with making a show and trusting that you'll find it together. But that's also been the joy of it.

Over the five months I've watched the young people involved grow enormously in confidence and resilience, take more and more ownership of the work and ultimately create something that felt completely theirs.

Listening to them talking about the show with such passion, excitement and ownership, explaining the choices we'd made, the world we'd created and what the whole experience had meant to them was really special.

A huge thank you to every young person who threw themselves into the process, to the brilliant core team at People's Theatre Collective and to the extraordinary group of skilled professional artists who came into many rooms over the past five months and always treated the young people as fellow collaborators.

There are lots of things I'll take away from this project about co-creation, what it asks of us as professional theatre-makers and what becomes possible when we're prepared to relinquish a bit of control and share the process. But for now, I'm mostly just very proud of them all.

The creative team was as follows:

Tristan Jackson-Pate (Director), Harriet Gill (Assistant Director), David Snell (Set Designer), Dan Parry (Production Designer), Hayley Stevenson (Costume Designer), Emma Brion (Costume Assistant), Sophie Beckinsale (Scenic Designer and Prop Maker), Eloise Sheffield (Stage Manager), Adrian Banks (Sound Designer) and Lewis Manley (Lighting Designer), with our professional cast Emily Butler, Laura Bay and Krage Brown.

For People’s Theatre Collective: Debs Howe (Strategic Director), Simon Lewis-Beeching (Finance Director) and Michael Deacon (Company Manager).