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Change in outlook

From the archive, first published Friday 19th Mar 2004.

IF YOU'RE planning a trip to see The Anvil's birthday project All Change!, forget everything that you would expect when you hear the term "community musical".

Instead, go along to be - in the words of its director Nick Stimson - "gobsmacked, shocked and impressed".

Brought to Basingstoke by The Anvil, Nick soon found himself thrown together with composer Howard Moody and poet Ian McMillan, trying to think just what on earth their basic idea would be.

"We basically created a piece over a weekend," Nick recalls. "But both Howard and Ian are incredibly talented, so it worked very well from the beginning.

"For our first meeting, we sat in a café in London, just talking through what it was going to be all about, and all we really decided was that it was going to be a train journey. The full, real story and all the details came later."

Nick, who is married with three children, was born and brought up in Crediton, Devon. A playwright and director, for several years he has been an associate director at The Theatre Royal, Plymouth, and until recently he was also artistic director of The National Student Drama Festival.

Did working so quickly with this project add any pressure to the experience?

"Not really, because this is what I do for a living. You've got to get going straight away and just get started. We knew we wanted to make a piece of theatre which could best be done by a community group, and one that would tell about the community and the lives of people in Basingstoke and that was enough."

Specially commissioned for The Anvil's 10th birthday celebrations, All Change!, with a cast of more than 100 local people of all ages, will follow on from the huge success of The Anvil's A Thousand And One Nights in 2000.

"Once we got the play complete, we went out and auditioned locals," Nick explains. "Then we went straight into a 12-week rehearsal period, and here we are less than two weeks away from the performances.

"It's very rare to see this many people on stage - even though they aren't on stage every moment of the time, the idea of ensemble is very strong."

How's the talent in Basingstoke?

"I'm particularly impressed by the levels of singing - I've never met another group with as many strong voices in there, and I've done quite a lot of shows like this in the past.

"I think it's really satisfying when you get on stage and the audience come along with expectations, something worthy, and then what we have done just absolutely blows them away

"We're trying to give people something you wouldn't really see anywhere else."

So will he look back on this time as a pleasant experience?

"It has been brilliant - you always lose a percentage of people through various crises but I think here we have the same number we started with, which is so unusual.

"I know it's easy to say but I really feel we have a generous bunch of people and there's a real sense of wanting to do it. You only need to see them performing."

And what are his tips on handling such a project to anyone thinking of embarking on something similar?

"You have to be very well prepared, and you really do have to trust your company, to value the ideas they contribute. I'm so proud of the results we've got out of it - it's an exciting, powerful piece of theatre."

All Change! will run at The Anvil from Thursday, April 1, until Sunday, April 4. For more information, call the box office on 01256 844244.

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