In November 2012 I was asked to join a small team of collaborators working on 'Scatter Like Ash', the first theatrical production from director-writer team Ben Mills and Nathan D'Arcy Roberts for their new company Plunger. This was a semi-devised piece of new writing, where characters were developed by the director, writer and cast through a series of individual and group improvisation sessions. Discoveries made during this exploratory process were then fed into the script which only came into play at the beginning of the production week. We staged two work-in-progress performances at the Camden People's Theatre in London in mid-December, to packed houses and excellent response.
Something terrible has happened. A small group of survivors find each other and live in a roughly assembled camp. The dark is creeping in - and so are personal conflicts. Then a child arrives, mute and alone. They tell stories around their makeshift fire, and discover that even when we lose everything, the one thing we still have is a story to tell.
Scatter Like Ash is the debut production from Plunger, a collaboration between director Ben Mills ("funny and heart-warming" - The Independent) and Royal Court Young Writers Programme graduate Nathan D'Arcy Roberts. It blends devised stories with a stark vision of the future to create a unique theatrical experience, and explores the role of storytelling in society, asking how we go forward when all we have left are words.
This production was developed with support from the Camden People's Theatre and the Jerwood Space.
