Farms, Libraries and Adventure Playground spaces for Orwell, Hardie, Carroll and Fry.: James Martin Charlton's Site-Responsive Productions of James Kenworth's Plays in Newham

Abstract

From 2014 to 2022, I directed a series of site-specific plays by James Kenworth in East London's Newham borough, funded by The Royal Docks Trust. Each production was staged at a non-theatre site. My role as a director was to facilitate productions that respond to the site's possibilities and uncover congruencies between the site and the content of the text.
My process is site-responsive, using Wilkie's taxonomy of site-based theatre; it involves exploring the site, allowing its form to meld with the story and text of the performance, and creating a deep synergy between site and text to create a unique meaning.
The productions were Revolution Farm (2014), A Splotch of Red: Keir Hardie in West Ham (2016), Alice in Canning Town (2019), and Elizabeth Fry: The Angel of Prisons (2022). Revolution Farm was a promenade production at an inner-city farm. A Splotch of Red toured community halls and libraries, while Alice in Canning Town was a promenade production over a vast children's playground. Elizabeth Fry was staged in a library space that aligned with the play's prison settings.
This paper offers a case study of my practice in staging these plays in these environments, drawing on public and critical reactions and theories of site-specific, community, and immersive theatre. I argue that as a director, it is my job to imaginatively excavate and collaborate with the sites to reveal a production which has always potentially been there, awaiting discovery. In this way, these sites become the site of a rough magic, which a responsiveness to space and its ever-existing potential as theatre can reveal.