Love From Cleethorpes
A six-part drama delivered through the letterbox to hard-to-reach rural audiences
Written and devised by Jack McNamara
August 2020
Nottingham-based theatre company New Perspectives have devised a new way of reaching isolated rural audiences through a six-part drama written on a series of specially designed postcards. Giving audiences access to an artistic experience outside of digital screens, Love From Cleethorpes will be a six part ‘postcard drama’, in which a different card will arrive in the audience members household each day. The audience member will read each card and piece together a relationship between two people told over a 30-year correspondence, travelling us from Cleethorpes to Nottingham via New York.
Artistic director of New Perspectives Jack McNamara said, “Rural touring is such a personal, tactile medium: our van arrives in a village, our company interacts with its community, we share the same space and sense of occasion. At a time when such activity has been put on hold I wanted to create something that offered our audiences a similarly up close experience. Putting theatre online is fine, but it does little to replicate that sense of something special being there in front of you that you can touch. The postcard is a beautiful medium, able to say so much with such a small window. And there is innate drama in waiting for something to arrive in the post, finding something just for you and studying it to piece together a dramatic narrative. We hope to be back on the road soon, but until then we hope this is a way of continuing to reach our audiences and bring exciting art literally to their doorstep.”
Also off-screen, New Perspective’s audio series PlacePrints by playwright David Rudkin is available on podcast apps. PlacePrints gives voice to a presence that haunts a location, a story that wishes to imprint itself on a place. New Perspectives’ trilogy The Spirit is currently available to stream as part of #BACGoingDigital. Originally performed at Battersea Arts Centre in 2020, The Spirit is a mesmerising, viscerally intense trilogy of performances from one of Europe’s most distinctive and radical performance artists, Thibault Delferiere, directed by Jack McNamara. The trilogy is available until 12th July on BAC’s YouTube channel here.
New Perspectives is an East Midlands based company with over 40 years’ experience of touring high-quality productions to venues of all sizes across the UK, from mid-scale theatres to village halls. With a strong rural core, they create productions to fit spaces of any size in order to bring new work that is unexpected and thought-provoking to a wide range of audiences. Since 2012, New Perspectives has been led by Artistic Director Jack McNamara whose productions include The Boss of It All by Lars von Trier (Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh and Soho Theatre), The Lovesong of Alfred J Hitchcock by David Rudkin (Brits off Broadway, New York and UK tour), Darkness, Darkness (Nottingham Playhouse co-production) and the Stage Award winning The Fishermen by Gbolohan Obisesan (Trafalgar Studios, Assembly George Square Studios and UK Tour)
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Supported using public funding by Arts Council England, Lottery Funded
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