Metta likes...Belarus Free Theatre

Through our dear friend, and patron of Metta, Laura Wade we've recently been introduced to the Belarus Free Theatre, or BFT. Having been on some of their marches/protests it was really lovely to put names to faces. And having now got to know them quite well it's lovely to put personalities to the names. The work that the BFT does is astonishing on so many levels - the art they make is beautiful and powerful, the workshops they lead inspiring and totally transformative for the participants, and everything they do is some form of protest against Lukashenko's regime - the last dictatorship in Europe. On top of this they are forced - as a theatre company in exile from their own country - to work from Britain on the tiniest of shoe-string budgets. Last year they had a smash hit in Edinburgh with their Fringe First award-winning show A Reply to Kathy Acker which will run at the Young Vic for a month in June next year, and before that they're doing an adaptation in Belorussian of King Lear at the Globe for their Globe to Globe Festival.

Lessons from Metta

After an awesome couple of years it's time for me to step down as Executive Producer for Metta. Since I started working with Metta, we've staged 111 performances of 8 shows in 17 different venues. It's impossible to do that much theatre without learning a thing or two, so I thought I'd use my last blog for the company to note down a few of the key lessons here.

Metta likes... Theatres

Despite our last tour being deliberately outside them one thing that we really like at Metta is theatres. Not just because they often house our plays, and even because they often house other plays, companies or performers that we really like. We are very fond of the buildings themselves.

For some theatres it's easy to see why. I recently made my fist ever visit to the Old Vic, and spent a sizeable amount of the interval craning my neck towards the ceiling and admiring what is an undeniable beautiful building.

Metta likes...Fruit

We're very healthy here at Metta HQ - we even have a vegetable patch outside our office (currently growing potatoes, courgettes, leeks, lettuces, tomatoes, broccolli, broad beans and peppers...and possibly some carrots though I'll have to check that with Will). But we've also gone mad on fruit lately because Sexing the Cherry (as the name suggests) is bursting at the seams with cherries, bananas, apples, peaches and even an occasional pineapple!

Sexing The Cherry is full of fruit!

Fruit is a good thing. It tastes great and it makes great theatre...

Metta likes... Touring

At the end of May we completed our first tour. As is so often the way of these things, it was right in the middle of all the exciting action that we had the least time to write about it. So here's my rather belated tour blog. Suffice to say, we don't just like touring, we LOVE touring.

As the piece that we were touring was our site-specific performance of The Man with the Flower in his Mouth, I feel that we got a heightened tour experience. We not only had to recreate our show in 10 different locations, but we had to build new performance spaces in each one too.