7 Things I Have Learnt From 'Kindertransport' (Setting up a Theatre Company)

It has now been a month since the opening night of Everything’s Rosie’s debut production, ‘Kindertransport’ by Diane Samuels, and now seems like a good time to reflect on just some of the many things I learnt during the time of the production and preproduction. I write this blog not only for anyone who might be interested, whether for professional or recreational reasons, but also as a way to track my own journey as I move onto new projects. To quote the oath that a lecturer made me take at uni ‘I, Cassie Osbourne, will never make these mistakes again. I will make new mistakes, more interesting mistakes.’ So, here are just some of the lessons that I have learnt from ‘Kindertransport’.

1. Nothing is certain until it’s certain…but sometimes that’s ok

This was a lesson that I learnt early on and was a very hard pill to swallow. Well, I say I’ve learnt it, I have already sort of made this mistake again with the project I’m looking at doing next (or rather the project I was looking at doing next) but we’ll choose not to think about it for now. When something is new and exciting, your first instinct is to share it with those close to you – family, friends, a new boyfriend – however you don’t want to, to quote Toby Ziegler, ‘invoke the wrath of the higher whatever’. Until there are signatures on dotted lines and (in some cases) money has been exchanged, plans can fall through and when this happens it can be utterly heart-breaking. These plans could be anything – theatres, casts, even the show you were planning. But what can you do? You have to pick yourself up and find something else. ‘Kindertransport’ wasn’t the first, second or even the third play that I considered and SLT wasn’t even on my radar…but they were the perfect choices.

2. Admin is your FIRST priority

So, I’m one of those people who finds admin and paperwork really therapeutic, like the ‘I will offer to tidy my mum’s computer files to relax’ kind of person. With that in mind, you wouldn’t have thought that I would have problems with admin, but you would be wrong. Contracts weren’t written until the night before I sent out emails about casting decisions. If you are reading this lovely cast, yes, you almost didn’t have a contract to sign before rehearsals started (and you are probably not even remotely surprised). I also didn’t think that budgeting would be part of admin. No, that’s being too generous to myself – I didn’t think of budgeting at all. This is not a good idea (and actually extremely irresponsible) when you are putting on a show or doing anything to do with a company really. Point is, when your boyfriend asks you how much you have spent, the answer shouldn’t be the incredibly vague answer of ‘errr an amount?’ that I gave. He has since sat me down and gone through with me how budgeting should be done (on the upside, I can now honestly add ‘purser’ to the list of things I do).

3. Get marketing started EARLY

When I say this, I’m not kidding around. I started thinking about plays in January, I chose ‘Kindertransport’ in March, I got the theatre and the rights in May and by June I had a cast and rehearsals had started. It wasn’t until then that I started to think seriously about posters and leaflets. The reason for this was that I believed that I didn’t have a product until I had a cast in the room, but this wasn’t true – I had had a product since I got the rights to the play in early May. This put me in a bit of trouble in terms of audience. You see, ‘Kindertransport’ is a GCSE (and possibly A-level) text, so a large part of my marketing plan had been around the idea of selling to schools…problem was, it was now June, and the end of the school year was looming. But that was fine, I thought to myself, I still had about a month to get things into schools. I could do that. I took some photos, did some editing, and chatted to a printer about what I wanted, and all seemed fine. The first red flag was that it took him a week to send me a quote. After a month of waiting and following up and downright nagging, I finally had flyers and posters but by then it was too late. Schools had broken up for summer.

4. Casting is just as nerve wracking for the director/producer as it is for the actor

‘They’re more afraid of you than you are of them’ apparently doesn’t just apply to spiders and small insects, but casting is a huge topic and deserves a blog of its own.

5. Don’t bite off more than you can chew

When you are basically a one-man band (albeit with a huge amount of support from friends and family), there are a lot of hats that you have to wear. You are a businesswoman, a producer, a director, a casting director, head of marketing, head of props, head of costume, purser (or you should be) as well as having a day job in order to have at least a little bit of money coming in. I was already a bit of a mess to put it mildly and I wanted to add one more thing to that list. I wanted to act. Yes, on top of the nine things that I was already doing, I had also originally planned to play Evelyn’s daughter, Faith. This idea was utterly mad, but I had somehow managed to convince myself that I would be able to do it – Faith is on through all of act one, but the amount wouldn’t be too much, and she is hardly on at all during act too so it wouldn’t be all that difficult right? Wrong! Luckily, knowing how wrong it would have been is something that has come with hindsight and only hypothetically. During the audition process I met Lucy Bone, an incredibly talented young actress who was auditioning for the role of Eva but wasn’t quite right. I liked her, I really liked her, but there wasn’t a part for her…. was there? I couldn’t ask her to play a part that she hadn’t auditioned for or even looked at. Why not? It was this decision that stopped me from fully going over the edge and made the play stronger.

6. Be crystal clear about availability and know when to say no

I’m going to be brief about this one as it led to a fairly nasty encounter in which I felt unsafe, so I’d rather not linger. When you are casting, be very clear at every point when rehearsals are and when missing some of them is manageable and when it would become difficult to balance. As a producer of a production where you can’t afford to pay actors very much, you have to be willing to be flexible so that they can still do or find other jobs that are going to make paying the bills easier. I decided that rehearsals would only be for three hours in the evening three times a week which in the grand scheme of things, isn’t all that much. There may be times when you are able to give an actor a few rehearsals off so that they can pursue something larger but that depends on where these dates fall in rehearsals and what part the actor is playing. There may be times when you have to say, ‘I’m sorry that’s not possible’ and you have to go your separate ways. I could have prevented this by making dates and times clearer and checking people’s availability at (or even before) auditions to make the situation easier for those involved, however the outcome would not have changed.

7. Remember to breathe

It’s hard to see the bigger picture when you are so close and difficult to look at what is being achieved when you’re worrying about books that don’t match and skirts you don’t have and letters that aren’t finished. When Katja hugged me backstage after the final performance, I burst into tears because it finally dawned on me what I had done. I had set up a theatre company and directed my first show in just over two months. And just like that, it was over. I had done what I had set out to do and it was on to the next thing. When you are putting on a show, with all of its joys and frustrations, it is important that every so often you take a moment to step back and allow yourself to be proud of what you are doing.