In Company… a blog from Co-Artistic Director, Matilda Leyser

Collaborating. Devising. Co-creating. All words I know from funding applications, blurbs about shows and other projects. But - here’s a confession – for years I have not been sure I know how to do any of these things. In fact, I’ve suspected that I am, constitutionally, best suited to working alone. I have always known I would never join a company.

Because I was one of those kids picked last for any team in P.E lessons. People described me as interesting, which was a code word for weird. I was what, back in the 70s, was called a tom boy - a girl that liked boyish things: I climbed trees, wrote poems (based on my school curriculum this was a largely male pursuit), wore a boiler suit instead of a dress to parties, and looked up, with ardour, to my two big brothers. I had certain solitary places – on the garage roof, up the willow tree – to which I would retreat. I did not make friends easily, and I used to feel a kind of meaning-sickness if ever I went for play dates at other people’s houses and had no control over how the game would go. Sometimes, during break time at school, I would circle round the edge of the playground to avoid having to talk to or play with anyone. Because how was it possible to be myself and be with others at the same time? And surely if I truly was myself no one would want to be with me anyway? It was so much safer to stay solo.

By ’98, I was a young adult at circus school. Circus makes being an outsider into a glamorous pursuit. But ‘Devising’ was on the timetable. I used to feel the same dread during those sessions as I had as a child on play dates. It was fraught negotiating whose ideas made it through, how to be kind to one other while also attempting to make anything that was worth watching. It felt like a painful game of chess, involving careful strategic planning – both the thing made and the process of making it. I decided to specialise in static aerial rope. Not trapeze. No flying or catching. I would climb up that singular vertical line and stay there. It was like crouching on the garage roof. I felt a little sad and jealous, looking down, watching my contemporaries pair up, make double acts, trios, troupes - but it was quite clear: up that rope, with its heightened sense of loneliness, was the place for me.

Over the next ten years I made five solos. Some brilliant people helped me, and I worked with several other companies, but I was never a signed-up member of any team. I had a boyfriend, but we were living apart. So, whatever collaborating I tried out, at the end of the day, I would scuttle back up my rope, or to my flat, on my own.

But the fact is, it was getting kind of lonely. So, I decided to be brave: I would come down to earth. I would retrain as an actor. I studied Stanislavsky, learned how to ‘action’ a text: ‘to provoke’, ‘to coax’ I wrote in tiny letters on my scripts. It struck me as a brilliant but bleak depiction of what devising, of what being at school, of what life was like: everyone engaged in a constant process of attempting to influence one another, to achieve their ends. Collaborating wasn’t that collaborative, when you went right inside the script of it.

But then…..

My first job out of acting school was with a company called Improbable, to be in a show they were making, called Panic. ‘Panic’ was about right – it was still what I felt deep down about the idea of working with others. I was to play a nymph - one of three. The show was, in part, a response to the fact that the company was led by three Artistic Directors, all of whom were men: Phelim McDermott, Lee Simpson, Julian Crouch. Time to invite some women on stage.

Panic was about The Great God Pan. It was also about sexuality, men and women, love and loneliness. There was no script. But there was no devising either. We improvised. What’s the difference? I remember an analogy emerged for this during the rehearsal process, which we called ‘the shy deer’:

The show was set, in part, in the woods. We talked about how special it feels if you come across a deer in the woods, and how we wanted the show to have something of this quality - a wild, shy thing, live on stage. But how to make sure the creature turns up? A devising process might involve an incredibly skilful act of taxidermy, or taming. Stuff the deer to make it look as life-like as possible, rehearse how to bring it on stage. Or capture it, tame it, rigorously train it. Improvising, by contrast, involves rehearsing, instead, only the act of listening, waiting, being in the atmosphere of the woods, hoping the wild, shy creature reveals itself. This approach, however, comes with a massive caveat/ The deer may not turn up at all. Your show might be entirely deer-less. At least in a devised scenario you can rely on having something to show for your efforts. Improvising involves a very different kind of training: the rigour of not knowing. 

I was surprised to discover that I felt much more at ease with this dangerous approach than I had during play dates or former devisings. I think this was because it was so apparent that no one could control the outcome. And also, I slowly realised, that the deer was us, or we were it. We were each wild and shy, nervous of showing up, of being seen, but in this environment- of practicing listening, of stepping quietly between trees, albeit theatrical ones - I began to feel more able to be present, to be me, in company.

That January, still in the midst of Panic rehearsals, I attended my first Improbable Open Space event - Devoted and Disgruntled, in Bethnal Green. It was another revelation. Here were hundreds of people around me, engaged in different kinds of chat and play. But I was explicitly invited, even encouraged, to follow myself, to walk around the playground – to move from group to group, or not talk to anyone at all. These behaviours had a value – apparently I was connecting up ideas, or holding the dreams of the group, not being a weird, sad, troubled outsider who couldn’t fit in. Both the rehearsal process and the Open Space felt less like a game of calculated strategies, more like falling in love. And fall in love I did.

I married the Great God Pan, and the Open Space facilitator – aka Phelim McDermott. I did too what I never thought I could – I joined a company. I became an Associate Director with Improbable. Julian Crouch left for America. Lee and Phelim carried on leading the company but now I was in it, though to one side, on the edge, associated with it. And, meanwhile, I became a mum.

Motherhood is paradoxical – on the one hand it is like founding and running your own company. You are never alone, not even when going to the bathroom. On the other hand, you are almost instantly, shockingly sidelined, excluded from professional, grownup spaces. The isolation was fine by me - nothing new. I dutifully read my parenting books.  However, they sounded like Stanislavsky, giving advice on how “to soothe,” “to limit,” “to instruct.” This new person clearly needed to be influenced, their days skilfully devised. But my kids weren’t having any of it. I followed, as best I could, the gentler actioning techniques and watched with horror and confusion as my son – also in panic when faced with the challenge of playing with others - thumped other children and me. It wasn’t working. My kids were wild and shy, and there was no taming them. I would have to improvise - again. Mothering two neurodivergent children has been, so far, an intensive, incredible, decade-long training in the understanding that trying to control or influence others is both a desperate and hopeless plight.

Which brings me, more or less, to the present, except that last year I underwent one more training, for which I never signed up: I turned fifty and came down with a life-threatening illness. For months I had such a severely compromised immune system that I was stuck in a hospital room on my own, and while the separation from my family was awful, it was easy to be in solitary confinement - I was back once more, crouched on the garage roof. Except, this time, when I heard a wood pigeon coo in the hospital courtyard, watched a bag of someone else’s blood drip into me, noticed the leaf tattoo on the inside wrist of the nurse as she opened the door, it became suddenly clear to me that isolation does not exist. There are wild deer everywhere, if only you attend to them.  

So, now, after all these different trainings, from circus to cancer, I think I may be ready, at last, to become a fully signed up member of a company – to join a very particular P.E. team.

Drum roll please….

I am ending my associate role and stepping up as another Artistic Director of Improbable.

We have been discussing this as if it is not much of a change, as if I have been, essentially, doing the job already and the change in title is something of a formality. But I do not think this is the case. I think it’s a big deal. Radical and surprising. Because being alone still feels more familiar. Because Phelim and Lee have been working together for years, and I have looked up to them as my cool big brothers, with whom I could never catch up. Because being in company - being yourself, while fully showing up to be with others, while leaving space for others to be themselves, while admitting that none of you can control how the exchange will go - is always a big deal.

So, it feels truly improbable, as in extremely unlikely, and yet rather wonderful that I – a lonely tomboy poet, turned aerialist - should end up in this company. I feel proud and immensely fortunate to be the first woman leading it as an Artistic Director - many brilliant women have supported and lead it in other roles already, but not this one. I can’t know how things will unfold, which is genuinely interesting: it may still be weird, or wild, but it won’t be lonely.