Just wanted to describe the development process of Small Town to place these accounts in context.

We started with a challenge from BAC and the National Theatre Studio to take an existing story and make it with a playing audience by themselves in a theatre with no actors. We chose Le Corbeau, a film by Clouzot, because it had a community as a protagonist, which resonated with our basic theatrical set-up. In Phase 1 we developed a game, The Gossip Game, which modelled the story quite closely, through playtesting at BAC, Shunt and Hide & Seek. In Phase 2 at the NT Studio we embedded the game and opened the world out for playing audiences, trying (and failing) to model the story of the film satisfactorily as we kinda knew we would. In Phase 3 at BAC we threw the film out, built a town that would play well as a gameboard and then tried different stories with playing audiences to see what played well. In Phase 4 at the NT Studio we took all the best bits of those stories with elements from the film and other thinking and wrote and plotted a draft of the story-play. In Phase 5 at BAC we scratched that draft with a playing audience and also used a digital advance to get players self-authored secrets into the gossip of the town. After some final development and making, we ran the finished theatrical release with full design in space, light and sound and a full advance both digital and workshops with diverse groups from the local community.

The whole process took a little over 2 years, because we wanted the resource the 6 (becoming 7) co-authors of the piece to be in a room together.

Brendan played Phase 2, Lyn played Phase 5, Matt played the finished Phase 6.

We had a grand review in Time Out too and were #1 Critics Choice for Theatre:
http://bit.ly/3lBANL

There’s a short video documenting the final production here:
http://vimeo.com/10429971

We hope that Small Town will be touring the UK and possibly internationally in late 2010 / early 2011.

best wishes