Theatre under fire

Are human rights and theatre a natural pairing? Some people respond with an instinctive aversion, envisaging a worthy mix of earnest hair-wrenching, polemical drum-beating and a soapbox thrown in for good measure. But for iceandfire, theatre is the natural arena in which to explore human rights: a live, engaged and engaging forum where these complex, often contentious but essential issues can be interrogated. This belief drives our work, along with the desire to make human rights a tangible entity, relevant to people’s everyday lives. This is not mere artistic musing: both I and Co-Artistic Director Christine Bacon originally trained as actors before going on to postgraduate study in human rights disciplines. This grounding has informed the way we want to tell human rights stories, opting for focus and detail by spreading our projects across four strands – production, outreach, education and participation – thereby reaching mainstream theatre audiences, students, community groups, human rights professionals and artists.
To root our work and find bigger, far-reaching platforms to tell these often hidden stories, we build relationships with a range of organisations – arts, community, educational and, importantly, those working in human rights. Over the past 12 months we’ve developed projects with, amongst others, Save the Children, Index on Censorship and Church Action on Poverty. By working together we can find new ways of telling invisible stories and taking them to audiences that did not know they existed. A recent example is ‘Rendition Monologues’, an outreach project created in conjunction with Reprieve, which uses the law to protect the human rights of prisoners. Telling the real-life stories of men who have been tortured and abused in the name of the war on terror, Rendition Monologues has been seen across the UK. Throughout this process, Reprieve has worked closely with iceandfire, offering expert advice, marketing the performance to its networks and providing support in the shape of speakers and associated events. In return it has developed a different way of raising awareness of its work, and developed a new audience interested in the lives of those they represent.

A key aim of our participation strand is to encourage artists to create work that has human rights at its core. This fuelled a fruitful and ongoing relationship with Amnesty International UK. Together we developed the national ‘Protect the Human’ playwriting competition, attracting more than 500 plays in two years, with the best plays receiving readings at high-profile theatres across the country. The 2007 winner, ‘S27’ by Sarah Grochala, recently had a successful run at the Finborough Theatre in London, named as Time Out Critics Choice and described as “a blistering account of the things that we will do to save our own skins” by The Guardian. This relationship is continuing in the shape of a script submission service which will be launched in late 2009. For us, human rights is a rich seam, with myriad possibilities for exploration and creation. By working alongside experts we can create work of rigour and depth, constantly finding new ways of telling human rights stories in the most effective, imaginative and dynamic way possible, with not a soapbox in sight.