Episode 4: Neil sits down with...Beth House and Elise Davison, co-founders of Taking Flight Theatre Company

(Music Plays in Background)

Neil Hancock: 00:00:00
(Music) Hello, everyone.  I’m Neil On Wheels, and this is my new podcast.  I can’t walk the walk but I can talk the talk.  I’m a wheelchair actor who wasn’t able to work during the pandemic but rather than sitting around doing nothing, I thought I’d sit around doing something.  In this series, I’ll be chatting to people in the Theatre, TV and Film industry about the challenges they’ve overcome in order to achieve great things in life.  My guest for this episode are Elise Davidson and Beth House, co-founders of Taking Flight, a theatre company based in Cardiff.  Taking Flight is an inclusive theatre company that aims to create accessible productions and opportunities to Deaf, Disabled and non-Disabled performers.  On a personal note, Elise and Beth gave me my first acting job 11 years ago playing Lord Capulet and Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet.  So it’s with great pleasure that I welcome them onto the show.  Hello, Elise.  Hello, Beth.

Elise Davison: 00:01:09
Hello, Neil.

Beth House: 00:01:10
(Chuckles) Hi. 

Neil Hancock: 00:01:14
Now, I first met you both in Chapter Arts Centre, I believe, in Cardiff, but my first question is, how did you both first meet?

Beth House: 00:01:24
Oh, shall I answer that one?

Elise Davison: 00:01:27        
Yeah, go on.

Beth House: 00:01:29
Elise and I were… a long time ago, we were working for Llanelli Youth Theatre, we were workshop leaders during the summer holidays with a group of young people in Llanelli to, you know, make theatre projects in the summer holidays, and we were both working on that and that’s how we first met.  And Elise gave us a lift every day.  She gave me a lift down to Llanelli every day from Cardiff, so we had lots of time to talk and get to know each other on that long car journey. 

Neil Hancock: 00:01:55
And so this project you’re working on, what was the project about that you’re working on? 

Beth House: 00:02:02
It was a youth theatre.  So we’d been asked by Llanelli Youth Theatre both individually, we didn’t know each other before but we both been asked to lead some summer holiday work with young people who perhaps hadn’t had the chance to do any drama before.  So it was nothing to do with kind of Taking Flight and how that’d developed, it was just the first time that we’ve met and worked together.

Neil Hancock: 00:02:22
So, from that, you obviously got to know one another.  And then, as a result of that, what prompted you to then start Taking Flight?

Beth House: 00:02:32
Do you want to answer that one, Elise?

Elise Davison: 00:02:33
No, go on.  You’re on a roll.  You can talk about it.  That’s great.

Beth House: 00:02:35
(Laughs) Oh, okay.  So, I had a phone call one day from – you’ll probably remember this gentleman, Neil, he became quite a big part of our lives for some years, Mike May, and he worked for National Trust at Stackpole in West Wales.  Do you remember Mike?  

Neil Hancock: 00:02:53
I do remember Mike very well.

Beth House: 00:02:56
Yes, he was always everywhere solving every problem.  So he worked for the National Trust down in Stackpole in West Wales, and he rang up to see if I would be able to lead a workshop with a group of adults with spinal cord injury.  They’ve been asked by the Back Up Trust, which is a charity that works with spinally injured adults and children, to do a workshop to build confidence and do some theatre skills, improve vocal strength and things like that after spinal injury.  And having not done any work specifically like that before, I was a bit nervous so I phoned up Elise and said, “Do you want to do this together?”  So we went off down to West Wales for a week’s residential, and we led this amazing drama week culminating in a very bizarre performance that we created as a group at the end of the week.  But while we were there, we kind of explored the local area, the woodlands which were all very accessible because the National Trust tend to make their green spaces accessible as well as the indoor spaces.  So we were kind of exploring the woodlands and the ponds, and we kind of got inspired, we were talking as we went around and said, “You know, wouldn't it be amazing to do a Shakespeare performance in this woods?”  “Yes.”  “And wouldn't it be amazing to do A Midsummer Night's Dream?”  And I think we were climbing trees and, you know, jumping over logs and things and we kind of said, “Actually, because it’s so accessible, wouldn't it be amazing to work with disabled actors as well as non-disabled actors?”  And then we kind of thought about had we ever seen disabled performers in a Shakespeare play, I don’t think either of us really had.  And so we thought, “Well, that’s weird, you know, why don’t we do something about that?”  And that’s where it all began.

Neil Hancock: 00:04:36
And so you decided to set it up in Wales.  Why Wales in particular?  What was it about Wales that made you want to say, “We’re going to set up here”?

Beth House: 00:04:46
Oh, go on, Elise, you have to answer this.  You can't hear anymore of my voice now. (chuckles)

Elise Davison: 00:04:50
(chuckles) I’m just thinking of the answer to that, actually, in a lot of ways because it just kind of happened.  I mean, obviously, we’d been working, as Beth said, down in Pembrokeshire and, you know, if you’ve visited Pembrokeshire, you’ll know how beautiful, beautiful it is, what a beautiful part of the world it is.  My family are from Merth—or my grandmother was from Merthyr, so, and I’ve always had a real connection with Wales and a real connection with my family that now all live in Cardiff, and Beth was living in Cardiff at the time, I wasn’t.  And so, we set up the company when I was still living in Birmingham, actually.  And then I was just pulled to Wales, I think it’s kind of why I ended up being here, and I’ve never felt more at home and it felt more welcoming, and I can't actually imagine Taking Flight existing in any other country.  Is that about right, Beth?  Is that kind of why it was at Wales?   

Beth House: 00:05:46
Yeah.  Yeah, I think so.  I think that’s right, isn’t it?  It was to do with… really, it was the opportunity that came from Mike at National Trust in West Wales and it kind of all grew from there.  And I think, because we then got on board organisations like Cadw, which is the kind of equivalent of English Heritage, so they look after the castles and lots of historic buildings in Wales, and they saw our first production and loved it, and somebody from Cadw kind of said, “Look, if you were to do this and tour it more widely, we would let you kind of use the castles that we run.”  And so, that made sense, didn’t it, Elise, because we then had National Trust in Wales, Cadw in Wales, and the Forestry Commission Wales – they were named at the time – because the gentlemen a guy called Dick who used to work at Afan Forest, which is the forest behind Port Talbot, that he had seen the production and wanted it in his forest.  So, it was all kind of Wales connections that were coming forward and saying this is amazing, can we support this to happen again.

Neil Hancock: 00:06:51
And I remember the Afan Forest, it was a lovely location to do all the shows that we did.  The trees and the surroundings were fantastic.

Beth House: 00:07:01
Yes.  And I don’t know if you remember, they had like a little natural amphitheatre that they had built in the forest, but unfortunately, after a few years of performing there, they had a problem with a specific disease in the trees which would be spread by people going into the forest.  So we weren't able to use that forest after the first few years, which is a real shame.

Neil Hancock: 00:07:21
And where does both your loves of theatre come from?

Beth House: 00:07:24
My love of theatre, oh my gosh, I don’t know.  I did drama GCSE, I think, and had a really lovely drama teacher called Mrs Phillips, who I still see to this day, in secondary school.  And I remember her saying to us all, because you know, you're set out and you want to be an actor and you think I’m going to be famous and all this, and I remember her saying one day, “If you want to make a career out of theatre, you will do it.  You might not be famous and you might not be a Hollywood actor and you might not win Oscar, but if you want to make a career in the theatre, you will do it, it will happen for you.”  And I remember that really sat with me and it kind of occurred to me that theatre and being a performer wasn’t all about, you know, being well known, being famous, doing something on EastEnders really, it could be about working to make a difference and working for some kind of change, and I think for me that’s when the seed was planted.  And then, you know, I remember going to see Jane Horrocks in the Rise and Fall of Little Voice when I was really young, at secondary school, and it just blew me away, I was like, “That’s what I want to be involved and that’s where I want to work.”

Neil Hancock: 00:08:30
And Elise, we've talked about Beth, where her love of theatre comes from, where did your love of theatre start?

Elise Davison: 00:08:38
So I always thought when I was younger, I really love dancing, I did a lot of dancing, and I kind of have this sort of dream that I’d be a dancer at some point; it was never really going to happen between you and me, but it was still a bit of a dream.  And I knew that I loved expressing myself through kind of movement and all of that kind of thing, and then in secondary school, again, it was a drama teacher actually that was really important in my life as well.  She asked me to audition for a school play, and that sort of changed everything.  I still love dancing and I still really enjoyed it, but I kind of then really just got this love for performing and I couldn't get enough of it and I just realise that it was what I wanted to do.  And then at university…  Because actually the school I went to, you couldn't do GCSE drama at the time that you did GCSE so I had to do it later on during A-levels, and I couldn't do theatre at A-level so I wasn’t kind of able to do that subject in at school.  So I kind of, I had this real desire that wasn’t—I wasn’t being able to do the thing that I wanted to do, so when I went to university, I thought that all I’d want to do then was performing.  And when I was there, I kind of changed direction and started to get much more interested in community theatre and theatre and education, and that kind of facilitation workshopping avenue of the theatre world, I was really privileged to work with some amazing, amazing tutors that really sort of shaped the way that I could see theatre as being more than just something that’s performed and that it can actually be quite a powerful tool.  And so I guess, that’s kind of where my journey started.  I did then go to drama school and then performed for like 10 years touring, but doing lots of different projects as a performer.  But I think it was school, again, where it really started.  It’s kind of a roundabout ways my life history potted there for you, a little bit. 

Neil Hancock: 00:10:50
Which then brings me on to your first production, I believe, was Midsummer Night’s Dream back in 2008.  And I just wanted to ask, what were the moments that you most enjoyed about that production?

Elise Davison: 00:11:04
I’ve just laughed to myself about that because all I think about… (chuckles)

Beth House: 00:11:06
Me too. (Laughs) 

Elise Davison: 00:11:07
…was the fact that we had a thunderstorm, pretty much, right on the second night was it, Beth?

Beth House: 00:11:15
Yes.

Elise Davison: 00:11:17
Second night we’re performing where we had to make the decision to cancel the show midway through, and Beth and I were still both performing at that stage in that production, and met each other running in different directions to change scenes in a forest, dripping wet, just making this decision that we had to cancel the show, swiftly followed by the next day, the winds were so strong in the woods that we weren't able to perform in the location that we’d rehearsed in.  So we moved location in a matter of hours, just changed it to go to a different location.  Yeah, that was all in one weekend. 

Beth House: 00:11:59
Yeah, I think that’s… I’m going to echo that.  It was just the kind of seat of your pants nature of it.  So we’re working with a team of disabled and non-disabled performers, some of them had not got an awful lot of experience in theatre, mainly because they hadn’t been able to access that, you know, a couple of our performers were like, “Well, nobody will give me a job, especially not in Shakespeare and especially not in outdoor Shakespeare because I’m seen as this kind of risk factor.”  So we had a really kind of diverse group of actors working with us.  There weren't many of us, there were six of us playing all the characters in Midsummer Night’s Dream.  We rehearsed for five, six days solid, and then we did seven performances over one weekend tacked on the end of that.  So we were all exhausted and exhilarated, and then the rains happened.  And we’d worked so, so hard, and then the winds happened.  And I love that Elise mentioned about meeting each other in the woods, because it was in their Lodge Park Woods at Stackpole and each scene was in a different area.  So you basically, as an actor, you’re kind of walking or running or wheeling through the woods at high speeds in the rain, changing your costume into your other character as you were going and kind of meeting yourself coming back the other way, hiding behind a tree to kind of put your trousers on and all of that sort of thing.  And then, the other actors would kind of pop out from the behind the trees or roll up the pathway and, you know, it was all fly by the seat of your pants, costumes from Primark, lanterns from Ikea, you know, £2.50 in a budget for props and costumes, and we all pull together and it just, it was absolutely exhilarating.  And I think that’s where I learned, Elise, to kind of manage bad news because I think the first… (chuckles) when you came up and said we’re not allowed to do it in the woods, the woods is going to be closed, I think I like lay on the floor and cried for about half an hour, (laughs) and was just like, “Are you going to lie on the floor and cry or are you going to get up and get on with what you need to do?”  And that was kind of a big lesson for me.  

Neil Hancock: 00:13:55
And what I found when I was working with you as well on our different productions is that audiences will actually stay in the rain with their umbrellas and follow you around.  You know, audiences do stay for that sort of thing. 

Beth House: 00:14:08
Yeah, not only do they stay, but they love it, don’t they?  It kind of builds this unique bond between performer and audience.  I remember, for example, in a production you’re speaking about, Anya who played Juliet wringing her hair out over the balcony at Kidwelly Castle.  And I remember you, Neil, on a mound at the end of a performance, hair matted to your head in this yet again another rainy performance, which happened a lot in Wales, yelling to the elements, “I feel invincible,” you know, and the audience kind of high-fiving you as they left, almost sort of you stuck with it through the rain.  And I think you had a PVC costume that year, Neil, so every time it rained and you tried to change your jacket quickly, it was very difficult because the PVC was soaking wet and, you know, all of that sort of thing.  All of those challenges, and the audience see that because they’re right there with you, they’re right next to you, and they see those challenges and, you know, they’re feeling the wind and the rain themselves and they just kind of dig in, don’t they, and go, “Don’t worry, we’re here with you, we can get through this together.”

Neil Hancock: 00:15:16
Do you know what, I don’t remember saying that, Beth.

Elise Davison: 00:15:18
Oh, you did.  You did so that, Neil.  We remember you saying that.

Neil Hancock: 00:15:23
(Laughs) 

Elise Davison: 00:15:24
We often say, we’d say, “Well, we probably should cancel this now because it is like… it’s torrential rain now,” and you still got the audience there under their umbrellas going, “We’re not going anywhere.” (chuckles)  

Beth House: 00:15:36
Yeah. (chuckles) 

Elise Davison: 00:15:37
If the audience are still there, we will still go on. (chuckles) 

Beth House: 00:15:40
Yeah.  And sometimes you’d be like, “Please, can you go home so that we don’t have (overlapping conversation).”

Elise Davison: 00:15:42
(Laughs) Yeah.

Beth House: 00:15:44
Right.  No. (chuckles) 

Elise Davison: 00:15:46
But it’s true.  You know, we live in the UK and if we cancelled every time there was a drop of rain, we’d never do a single show, so. (chuckles)

Beth House: 00:15:55
Yes.  And then you’d have the challenges of how do we get these costumes dry by the next show in a couple of hours, how do we get these actors dry and the props.  And actually, we haven't even got anywhere.  I mean our actors, and especially in the early years, how resilient were they because we’d perform at places like Caerleon Amphitheatre where there is no building so you’d be kind of sitting in your car and trying to hide your costume changes behind the doors of different cars all parked up next to each other, nowhere to make a cup of tea, and then you’d all pile out of the vehicles and do the show in the rain and then have to find somewhere to get kind of warm and dry afterwards.  So it’s kind of real testaments of the performers that we worked with who didn’t, you know, wheel or run away very quickly from us. (chuckles)   

Neil Hancock: 00:16:41
What did you think you learned from the first show you did Midsummer Night’s Dream that you took forward into future shows like Romeo and Juliet?  What sort of things did you think, right, okay, that worked, that didn’t work, moving forward we’re perhaps going to do that slightly differently?

Elise Davison: 00:17:01
I think, the being adaptable and being ready for anything to happen (chuckles) was definitely something that we learned.  I would say that from Romeo and Juliet, actually, we learned a few lessons as well like we were going to only really work in working boots after that because the shoes that had been bought disintegrated because of the amount of rain that happened.  So there was a few sort of practical things that came out of particularly the Romeo and Juliet tour.  But I’d say after Midsummer Night’s Dream one, it was also that you need longer than five days to…

Beth House: 00:17:43
Yeah. (chuckles) 

Elise Davison: 00:17:44
Although we managed it, to not all kind of burn out with being exhausted.  And that wouldn't have been a model that we could have maintained anyway, it works for the first production.  But then, you know, just the adaptability I think really and just being ready for everything that the elements might throw at you, you need sunscreen one minute and the next minute you need to be waterproofed up, always have a flask of tea with you and some food because you’ll never know where you’re going to be able to get any of that from.

Beth House: 00:18:14
Yeah, definitely.  The Plan B was that… you know, having a Plan B and being okay with that, like not lying on the floor for half an hour and crying if things have to change.  But also, what I found quite challenging after that first year was having been in a show as a performer and obviously, really loving that experience of being a performer and the artistic aspect, but always having to have an eye on where’s this going next, who’s in the audience, how can talk to them and convince them to, you know, come back next year, or for example with our first audience we had, somebody from National Botanic Gardens in the audience, so there’s that, it was teaching it us all the time, you know, how to business plan at the same time as artistic plans.  So it’s not just, “Oh next year we want to do this show and won't that be lovely?” but always thinking, you know, how can we add more venues to our tour, how can we raise more money, who else might invest in this other than the Arts Council of Wales.  And that was a big, big, big, big learning curve after the first performance, and just the exhilaration of just doing it for its own sake but then once we realised, we wanted to develop that on how you could balance the artistic stuff with kind of trying to develop an organisation. 

Neil Hancock: 00:19:25
And in terms of staging, what type of things do you have to be aware of when you go on tour, to different locations?

Elise Davison: 00:19:35
In terms of outdoor theatre?

Neil Hancock: 00:19:38
In terms of outdoor theatre, yeah.

Elise Davison: 00:19:40
Things like if you’re going to do a scene on a beach, to check when the tides are… (laughs)

Beth House: 00:19:50
(Laughs) 

Elise Davison: 00:19:51
If there were going to be boats being transported through the middle of that scene.  If it’s on a major dog walking route.  You know, just being aware of what’s happening in the places that you kind of put yourself.  You need to be able to ensure that the performers have shade and there are places where they can rest and change.  And you do look for your natural spotlights when the sun’s out.  So you do look for your natural amphitheatres which help with the sight lines.  Sight lines can be a problem particularly if you have large crowds, so finding any places that are slightly more elevated or the audience can be sort of either elevated or lower down.  Acoustics wise, looking for the places where which you have those echoes which make those moments.  Looking for your little quirky places where people can just be and can pop out and can move around.  And what the joyous thing about having an amazing performing team with you is that they start to really discover those little places themselves as well.  And so, although for the first couple of moves that you might move the show around, that I would tend to be with the team, that after that they wouldn't usually need to have me necessarily there because they’re really also in-tune with picking those beautiful spots that they all come up with amazing ideas themselves.  

Beth House: 00:21:32
It’s worth sort of highlighting what Elise is saying there that… because lots of people listening might have been to see an outdoor Shakespeare and think that we are talking about building a stage in a castle and then performing on the stage.  But as you’ll know, Neil, our work wasn’t quite like that.  We would utilise the entirety of that venue and the audience would move around with us from scene to scene.  So they might, you know, like I was talking about coming around the corner and seeing a dying Juliet or, you know, each scene would be in a different spot within that woodland or castle, which was quite unusual, I think, at the time, especially with all the other parameters that we had in.  But obviously, added to what Elise has said, we always had the access for our creative teams and our audience at heart.  So whilst we’re talking about using outdoor venues like castles and gardens, we could only use those venues if they had access for wheelchair users, and not just for our audiences but also for our performers, because many of the performers that you worked with like you, Neil, were wheelchair users or would have other mobility issues that they would need to have full access.  So there were lots of castles in Wales that we could never perform in because they just started with a massive flight of stone steps or, you know, were really rocky and had no paved pathways.  So we had to be really careful about which venues we could go to.  And sometimes we got that wrong as well because… we learned very quickly not to trust photographs, not to trust necessarily what the curators of the castles or gardens would say, because they would say, yes, it’s completely accessible but they’d forgotten that there were four steps to get into the venue.  So we had to do a lot of site visits and making sure that those spaces and venues were really properly accessible, and then only use the parts of those that all of the cast could get to.  So that added a real challenge.

Neil Hancock: 00:23:25
And I also remember that you would use a lot of music in your shows.  What do you think music brings to the production?

Elise Davison: 00:23:33
Oh, Neil, these are such a good questions.  We always got loads of really positive feedback about the use of music in the shows, incidental and when some of the Shakespeare was put to music like really brilliantly and cleverly by the musical directors that we worked with over the years.  But also the fact of live music, so our music was not pre-recorded, it was performed there in front of you and you’d be grabbing a guitar from an audience member or asking them  to hold your guitar, and there’s something again about that beauty of live music being played that one time for you as an audience and you’re in it together, and it just… there was a lot of humour to be had with some of the songs that we created, but also, some really emotive moments that were amplified by the use of music.  And there were times when we had almost an entire band.  I mean, the talent of the performers that we’ve worked with over the years is phenomenal, you know, just… and nearly in a type… like a whole brass section at one point in the Winter’s Tale which was just, you know, these skills that you just would come out in rehearsal sometimes with some of them go I play a little bit of saxophone and it turns out they’re absolutely phenomenal.  And, yeah, it’s just—it’s been a… it’s a joy to use music in productions to kind of get everybody involved and it’s sort of warms you up as well on a kind of cold day.

Beth House: 00:25:13
Yeah.  And in later years, I think, and including with our indoor shows because we have kind of moved and done more touring indoors in venues, sort of more traditional tourings in the later years, but also exploring using music has access, so I know that Elise worked really hard on…  I think the first time was, as you like it in 2014, there was a scene where one of the characters was dressed up as boy and goes into the woods and the song that was written for that change of clothes was actually audio description.  So, a non-blind audience member might listen to the song think, “Oh that’s a really lovely song about changing clothes,” but if you’re a blind audience member, it was actually giving you the description of this change of costume, which is really an effective way of making audio description as exciting and exhilarating as the piece of work itself, so that you’re not just kind of describing in a traditional sense, it’s really brilliant, you know, vibrant piece of work that the audio description is embedded into that.  And I know that Elise has been working with musical directors in later years on using sound and music to support the access, the audio description and other aspects of access as well, which is really exciting and interesting.

Neil Hancock: 00:26:29
Moving on from your outdoor shows now, I just wanted to ask, in 2012, you staged the production of Real Human Being by Welsh playwright Matthew Bulgo.  It was a forum theatre project that explored disability hate crime.  How did you become involve with that? 

Elise Davison: 00:26:49
Oh Beth, you’re going to have to help me out as I remember all of the facts from 2012, it’s… (chuckles) it seems a long way away.  But we were approached by Disability Wales to create a piece of theatre that tackled disability hate crime, and we received funding from… who was the first (overlapping conversation) 

Beth House: 00:27:10
The Home Office, UK Home Office.

Elise Davison: 00:27:11
UK Home Office, to develop this piece of forum theatre.  And Matthew Bulgo wrote a stunning, stunning production that was really hard hitting.  And there were accompanying workshops, which I’ll let Beth talk about, which looked at the ways in which the audience could feel empowered to making change and not just taking that traditional audience role of watching a piece of theatre and then going home at the end of it.  And Beth, do you want to carry on talking about Real Human Being?  Because I know you’re on the road with it for quite a lot of the time.

Beth House: 00:27:52
Yes, I can do.  Yes, so we piloted it in 2012 and that was really kind of led by Elise and Matthew Bulgo, Disability Wales, and did loads and loads of research initially, didn’t you, Elise, with disabled people, mainly disabled people from Bridgend who were very kind and shared their experiences of hate crime which obviously is very sensitive for people to share.  But those genuine experiences of things that had happened to real people were brought into this pilot project which all took place in Bridgend, and you know, and the people that had shared their experiences then were involved in the development of the project and the kind of carrying on with the project to make sure that it really reflected things that had happened to real people.  And we’d carried on developing this then and gained funding from Welsh government for three years, an equality and inclusion grant, and we worked with disabled actors to create these characters.  And it was really exciting production because we’d go into a school, into Year 9 usually, and we’d spend all day with them.  So they would spend the whole day with the characters, mainly, sometimes they’d be with the actors but it was really clear when they were with the characters and with the actors, but they would get really excited about this experience because they could talk to the characters over the course of a whole day.  So they’d see the show broken up into little pieces and then they get the chance to interact so they could stop the action and go back to a point when they felt that that character could have done something differently to change the outcome, and they would get up and replace a character, a certain character, and they could try out their ideas in this safe environment, and it was really exciting because while it was kind of focusing on disability hate crime, we actually noticed over the course of the three years that these young people were developing these skills in their own context.  So some of them will come up at the end and say, I’ve experiences similar things to this character, but because of my cultural background, or because of my appearance, or because of my impairment which happened a lot, and so these young people kind of applying it to their own experience and they were able to test out these behaviours and this kind of tools that they thought would be positive in a safe space where if they got it wrong and they did something that maybe wasn’t very positive, it was only an actor and they weren’t actually going to make a real situation any worse.  Say for example, we’d have lots of young people suggesting violence and they could try out with very strict parameters and we had a really good mechanism for allowing them to try out their ideas in a safe way, but they could see the outcome of that, like what would happen if you did that, what things would then snowball, and they could really get a sense of a situation and exploring all the different aspects.  And then also, like looking at other people’s behaviour and thinking why is that person behaving like that?  Is it because they’re just the bad person and we should kind of put them in that box and decide that they’re a bad person, you know, we don’t want to have anything to do with them?  Or could something else be going on?  So they really started to, you know, understand each other and empathise, it was really exciting project.  

Neil Hancock: 00:30:56
I always think it’s… when you got the idea of a choice and consequence going on in a show, it’s always very interesting for an audience to watch because, especially when you can… where your choices can change and alter the action, I’ve always found dramas and games in that particular… very, very interesting how the outcome can change.  

Beth House: 00:31:21
Yeah, I totally agree.  But I think you’ve got to be really brave with that.  You can't say to a group of young people, what would you do differently, but only within the parameters that we set out, “Oh no, you can't try that.”  You know, we were very nervous at the beginning because obviously, especially when they’re kind of in front of each other, a lot of young people want to suggest ideas that are really outlandish and perhaps could be perceived as being really silly.  But if you start putting in parameters and saying, well you can't try that out because that’s just a silly idea, we mean sensible ideas, then you’re starting to lose trust because these young people are saying, well, you told us that we can have ideas and now you're telling us that before you even tried them, you're going to say no, that’s not the right kind of idea.  So we had to develop loads of mechanisms for them to try out any idea in a safe way so that they would trust us and know that we really meant what we said, they could try out what they thought was a good idea and we would see what happened, but obviously, then they got to witness the consequences of that.  So I remember one young person got up and said he would punch the antagonist in the face, and she was a very small young woman and he was quite a strong lad and he said I would punch her in the face, and, you know, you have to kind of explore that and…  So we put in place a kind of a way that we could do that without any physical contact.  And then he got to witness, you know, this young woman falling to the floor and then all of their things that happened after that, somebody ran off to get a teacher, somebody calling an ambulance and all of that, and you could see on this young man’s face the realisation of what he had done.  He had suggested violence against another person and then he got to see what happened when all of that kicked in, and you could see on his face that moment of what have I just done.  And then his peers are saying to him, “Well, that didn’t go very well, did it?”  You know, and so, you’ve got to genuinely allow those ideas to come forth if you’re going to offer that, I think.

Neil Hancock: 00:33:23
And you won a National Diversity Award in 2013 for it.  How has that helped you as a company in creating new work? 

Beth House: 00:33:32
Elise, you answer that one.

Elise Davison: 00:33:34
I’m not really sure how to answer that.  I think it was lovely to have a National Diversity Award, it’s such an amazing organisation.  We didn’t actually go to the ceremony because Beth was heavily pregnant, I think, at the time and I had a very small baby, we didn’t think we’d win anyway.  So, but Dan Edge who was one of the performers who’d worked in Real Human Being quite a few years went on our behalf, and then we won, which was a really lovely thing to happen.  And there couldn't have been a better person to pick up the award for us than Dan because he was so instrumental in the whole development of Real Human Being and in… and he was on, oh, a number of tours, three of the tours I think possibly.

Beth House: 00:34:18
Something like that, yeah.

Elise Davison: 00:34:19
Maybe more.  Something like that.  But just, he was just such an amazing person to have been there representing the project and the company.  And, yeah, it was quite an amazing thing to achieve.  But as Beth’s just explained, the project really was so powerful and, you know, we often get asked when it’s coming back, when will people be able to book it again, when they’ll be able to see it again.  So, it’s still a project—I mean, it hasn’t toured for four, five years now and yet people still talk about it and still remember it, which is a testimony to the performances and the to the amazing writing that Matthew did and the facilitation, that where Beth was facilitating it and really was encouraging people to make some of those brave choices and to explore all those avenues.  So that award, I think, helped us in some way to achieve in the funding for that project to carry on for a little bit longer which was great because it reached so many more young people and was just, just such an important project in Taking Flight’s journey and we learned so much from the performers that we worked on that project, in terms of performance but also in terms of the logistics of booking a tour and loads of things that we’d implemented into our future work.  So, yeah, I hope that answers the question, it’s kind of a roundabout way.  I don’t know if Beth, you want to add anything.     

Beth House: 00:35:50
No, I don’t think so.  I think it’s a mark of recognition, isn’t it, that it’s never going to hurt when you're going for funding for any project after that.  If you can say you’ve got a National Diversity Award, people see that as a kind of a stamp of approval and that you're genuinely committed to looking at who gets to make work and who the voices are that you’re working with.  And, yeah, I think it’s really important to mention that the project, over the course of the pilot and the three-year tour that was funded by Welsh government worked with over 12,000 young people, and we didn’t just go into schools, we went to a lot of mainstream secondary schools and worked with Year 9, but we also went into pupil referral units and specialist school and worked with learning disabled young people, and we went into after school clubs and community centres.  So the project really did reach out to lots of young people who weren't necessarily in education at the time as well so it’s really broadly reaching, and I thought well-deserving of the National Diversity Award because it was doing something really different.  And it’d be worth shouting out here to Cardboard Citizens as well because they’re an organisation based in London that work with people who have experienced homelessness and they are really the go-to people on forum theatre in the UK and worldwide.  And we worked with—or I did some training with them and they really, really helped support, they sent down one of their team members to train our team members and they worked alongside us to make sure that we were kind of honouring real forum theatre and it was a really lovely experience to have them onboard as well.   

Neil Hancock: 00:37:25
And what I always thought was great about Taking Flight is even in the early shows that you did, you not only had say a sign language interpreter, usually you see sign language interpreters on the side of the stage, but you had the signer actually integrated in the performance, so smoothly that it—and to such an extent that you almost couldn't imagine that person not being there.  You know, it was very much they’re one of the actors and they’re serving the text as much as everyone else is, you know, they weren't separate from the action and I thought that was absolutely incredible.  How was the accessibility in your shows evolved from that point until now? 

Elise Davison: 00:38:15
So, yeah, I agree with you, Neil.  I mean, the BSL interpreters that we worked with have all been phenomenal and have been an essential part of the team and have been brought so, so much to those productions.  And it did evolve, our creative access journey really has evolved from having a BSL fairy in the early, early days, to having integrated BSL and creative captions and audio description integrated as well into the productions.  And it’s been a step-by-step process and a lot of our development has been down to those creatives that we’d worked with.  So, like when we worked with Sami Thorpe, for example, who’s one of the BSL interpreters who’s in quite a lot of Taking Flights productions, you know, she would really ask a lot of really important questions to the cast and to me and really make a sort of think about the way that we were expressing the text.  And we also brought in some amazing deaf consultants to work on the translation of the text and to help us with the songs that we talked about earlier obviously, the songs brought something really beautiful to the productions that we wanted to be also echoed in the BSL interpretation of those songs so that the feeling of the songs came across as well.  So we worked with some amazing deaf consultants on various productions and some amazing deaf performers also in our productions who really, really sort of—it was a game changer working with a lot of the amazing performers like Stephen Collins and Steph Back who brought so much themselves, and then working alongside our onstage interpreter and then with other, the deaf consultants that came and work really meant that that BSL translation was completely at the core of what we were creating.  And in a similar way we did the same with our audio description, we started having the shows audio described through headsets with the audio describer in the audience.  And the new started to have a new audio describer in costume and on the stage, Alastair Sill.  And the new started thinking about actually integrating the audio description and we spoke to consultants like Chloe Clarke who was one of our performers for a long, long time.  You’ll remember Chloe from Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night.  And Chloe would come and really sort of help us to develop that audio description that we were integrating and highlight some of where those gaps were and you might be able to put in as creative audio description.  And we’ve also worked with Tafsila Khan as well who’s also advised us on the way that we put audio description in to our productions.  And I think the show which really started to be a game changer in terms of audio description was the second time we did Romeo and Juliet where our audio describers were part of the school radio, and they… there was two prefects who… there was a bit of banter going on in the way they deliver the audio description, so sometimes there was discussions about how they might audio describe something, sometimes they voiced over the BSL so they would voice over when Juliet and the Nurse, for example, were having a conversation because Juliet and the Nurse performed their… their roles in BSL, and so sometimes they were voiced over by our radio audio describers.  And it’s a real risk.  It was a real kind of, is this going to work, kind of thing, (chuckles) and on opening night it was like, “I still don’t know if this is going to work or not.”  But it did and it really sort of changed a lot of the ways that we started to play with the audio description.  We had feedback from a deaf reviewer who said to us, “I’m not saying put a sign over the audio describer’s… around their neck to say they’re audio describing, but if their mouths are moving I kind of want to know what that’s all about.”  So we made a sign in The Tempest and we held that sign up when it was audio description to try and sort of make that clear when the audio description was happening.  So it’s really a question of having that conversation with the audiences and having a conversation with our performers and trying to really develop the way in which we could start to play with creative access and, you know, there’d been times when that hasn’t worked, when the kind of the artistic ideas have sort of somehow made the access not what it should be, and so the feedback we’ve had then has helped us to shape that again and to change that and to kind of try new things as we move forward.  One of the things that working indoors has allowed us to develop that we couldn't do with the outdoor work is our use of captions and creative captions, which we started to do really in our family production You’ve Got Dragons where we used animations and cartoons as ways of increasing the access in captions, and we’d started to do that also digitally now.  But we were unable to do that in the outdoor shows because even though we’ve got the technology to work, we were… the sun was there and you couldn't see the captions.  So, it’s been nice to be able to develop those and work on that sort of access journey a little bit with the indoor productions and hopefully, if we do start to make more work outdoors again that we might eventually find a way that we could start to make that happen.  But it’s still a journey, we’re still learning, we’re still, you know, creating and developing different ways of keeping access at the heart of all that we do, and it’s the teams that we work with that really make those journeys and those discoveries possible.   

Beth House: 00:44:10
Yeah, I think it’s really worth mentioning, Neil, when we talk about access, we don’t just mean for audiences either.  I mean, Elise just talked about our creative teams, there’s a separate kind of whole realm of access for our creative teams in the rehearsal room to what there is for our audiences and creative teams onstage.  So it’s just worth mentioning that when we talk about access, I know lots of theatre companies and us organisations mean… when they talk about access, they mean for audiences but we assume that our creative teams will need access as well.  So even when we don’t know who they’ll be yet, we know there’ll be access requirements within our creative team, and we know that we will put those in place, and that we budget for that straightaway right in the beginning.  We put an access pot in even if we don’t know if we’re going to be working with a deaf performer, blind performer, performer with physical access requirement, we just put decent amounts of money in the budget so that we can address those needs as they come up.  So that’s what we mean when we talk about access, is audiences and our creative teams.   

Neil Hancock: 00:45:06
And I wanted to ask you specifically, Elise, because you’re the director of the shows that you do.  Has your rehearsal process changed at all since I worked with you, and if so, how?

Elise Davison: 00:45:22
Wow, Neil, this is another brilliant question, I hope so.  Yes, I have been lucky enough to have done quite a lot of sort of…  Well, let me think.  Let me start this question again.  So I worked with you in 2010, first of all, didn’t I?  And then I worked at National Theatre Wales as an emerging director in which I was able to shadow and work alongside John McGrath and I learned quite a lot from him.  And then I’d been… was an assistant director, again in like 2012, 2013, and again learned loads from that experience.  And I’ve directed outside of Taking Flight quite a lot and I was quite early on in my directing career when we first work together.  I hope that what I now create in the rehearsal room is a really, really exploratory space where we’re really free to play and make mistakes and that everybody feels that they are supported, and that goes everywhere and to everyone in that space, so myself included, I get a lot of support from the teams that I’m working with as well.  I’ve used a lot more clowning in more recent years, and that’s from kind of working with John Wright and Holly Stoppit, having been in various workshops with them, and that’s been really lovely way of developing my own practise.  And like I say, I’ve just learned from so many people that I’ve worked with to be able to look at the way that I work as a director and look at the, maybe, some of the decisions that I made that weren't particularly the right ones at the time or the way that I maybe ran a rehearsal space and it could have been a more productive space and really sort of analyse what I have done in the past that I don’t want to do necessarily again, but also in the ways that I can really make that space the most fertile that it can be to allow everybody to bring what they need to bring into that space and just be really supportive of each other.  We also tend to have a bit longer in rehearsals now than we did when we first worked together, Neil, where we were really up against it time-wise to make the shows happen.  So hopefully, with that bit of space that we have as well, there's a bit more breathing space in the rehearsal room, yeah.       

Neil Hancock: 00:48:01
And do you tend to look at access first before you approach any text or, is the text still the key thing and then you work out the access as you go?

Elise Davison: 00:48:11
So access comes first, and the discussions that I will have with the designer on the shows will focus quite a lot on the access very much in the early days is one of the first things that we talk about in terms of access for the audience, as Beth said, but also, access for the performers.  So we’ll look at like, like we did when we worked with you, Neil, for example the costumes and how accessible they can be for the performers and also, what access requirements we may need to have in the rehearsal spaces.  And as Beth said, that’s always in place so that we are never restricted to who our cast may be, so that when we audition we have everything in place to work with whoever we find for the roles that we're... in the shows that we’re making.  So the access, it comes first, and then we find a way for that to be then creatively embedded into either the text or the piece of work that we’re devising or we’re adapting on whatever the work is that we’re doing. 

Neil Hancock: 00:49:20
And do you find there are some plays that are harder to make inclusive than others?

Elise Davison: 00:49:27
No, I think you just have to think about different ways to approach the text.

Neil Hancock: 00:49:32
Yes.

Elise Davison: 00:49:33
I mean, I would say, it’s not often that you open a play and in the description of the characters it very clearly says in bold, “This character is not therefore disabled.”  You don’t tend to have that as a character description.  So, I think that sometimes that can be used as an excuse for not making inclusive or accessible work, but I think there is always a way to make work inclusive, there is always a way to provide access.  And to provide access creatively, you just have to work out what will work best for that piece.  And that means talking to people and having those conversions with your creative team and with deaf and disabled creatives and consultants about how you could do it, and then the ideas will start sparking and you bounce off each other and there are always ways, it’s just not seeing the things that you may think are barriers to making something inclusive but seeing those barriers is opportunities to make things more accessible and to work in an inclusive way.  There is never a reason not to.   

Beth House: 00:50:37
I think it’s a really important point that Elise just made about the move now from seeing deaf and disabled performers as being limited to deaf and disabled characters, and what we’re seeing now a little bit more in theatre and, you know, lots of really positive BBC programmes that have cast deaf and disabled performers of any character is just incidental that they’re deaf or disabled, and it’s not a plot point, it’s not a device, it’s not like the inspiration for some story about triumph over adversity, it’s just that that character happens to be disabled.  And I think that’s the shift that we’re seeing now.  And that means, doesn’t it, that anything can be inclusive because who says that Hamlet is not a wheelchair user?  Who says that, I don’t know, Gwendolyn in, you know, The Importance of Being Earnest isn’t a visually impaired performer?  Where were those rules written down?  And I think that’s where we’re going to start to see inclusive productions now where people are kind of getting that that we don’t have to just put people in their casting boxes.  

Elise Davison: 00:51:42
I think as well that the Ramps on the Moon initiative has really done quite a lot to move that idea forward with their real kind of blockbuster shows that just happened to have a cast of deaf and disabled performers and just happened to have integrated access, there’s no focus, like Beth said, on being about being disabled or being deaf, it’s performers, brilliant performers making brilliant work.  And also, something that I think people see—they sometimes see making work accessible as something boring and tedious and that’s going to somehow not allow them to fulfil their artistic vision. And I challenge that to say, actually, it’s what will make your artistic vision, because finding different ways of approaching something is the most exciting, most liberating, and most fulfilling way to work rather than just seeing the problems.  There’s no problems to making something accessible, there’s only different ways that you can do that, in the same way as there’s no set way to have a vision about how production will happen.  Anything is possible if you have the right mindset and you have the right team, and that’s what I think.

Neil Hancock: 00:53:10
But in addition to all your shows, you’ve also recently opened your first youth theatre for deaf and hard of hearing people.  How did that come about?

Beth House: 00:53:20
That really came about through working with lots and lots of amazing deaf performers, deaf professionals over the years of Taking Flight, and then hearing their stories about the lack of access to training, the lack of support, the lack of adult aspiration for the when they were children and young people, lots of people talked about being told they wouldn't be able to, they couldn't, how could they possibly, what were they thinking, and so it was really important to us to address that.  Because we wanted to work with more deaf professionals and yet we couldn't see any of them coming through the training in Wales because there wasn’t any training.  So it was really important to us to address that and kind of peel the onion and go, “What’s the issue here, how can we help to solve that?”  We can't just sit back and say, “Oh, well, there aren’t any newly qualified deaf actors to work with here in Wales, we had to do something about that.”  So we started quite a long time ago, actually, with some kind of feasibility studies.  We did lots of talking to groups of parents and young people who were deaf and asking them if that’s what they wanted, because obviously there’s an assumption, “You must want to do theatre,” and we found out that there was a real appetite for that and that people would really like that to happen.  And so then we did some test sessions led by some brilliant deaf performers, Lara Steward and Stephen Collins came and worked with us in the summer holidays with some young people.  And then of course, we were able to gather all that wonderful feedback and all the evaluation that we had around that, and finally get our funding from BBC Children In Need for a three-year youth theatre, which opened last January.  And it’s really important to mention that the youth theatre is deaf-led, so the person who plans and delivers all the activities is a deaf person, Steph, who worked with us in a lot of our productions as well.  And there’s lots of deaf volunteers, deaf and hearing and disabled volunteers who work on the youth theatre as well.  And at the moment, we got 25 young people, obviously the real challenge has been that we were in the membership building phase when COVID struck and whilst we were just kind of gathering young people into the youth theatre, it’s not very attractive to say, “Do you want to come to a youth theatre on Zoom,” particularly not if you’re a deaf young person because Zoom is not the most accessible or enticing place to be for a deaf young person.  So we’re in the membership building phase of the youth theatre when COVID struck, but we’ve retained all our members throughout the pandemic which has been really fantastic.  Steph and Anna who is the youth theatre assistant have delivered a programme of online activity but not just in one way they have done live Zoom sessions but they’ve also done… we had an amazing placement student called Sian who came and worked with us, and she was doing some creative arts activities so the young people would be sent out boxes of materials in the post and they would be sent a link to a YouTube video that they could watch in their own time.  So it wasn’t live, it didn’t mean that they had to be in a Zoom with loads of other people watching them, they could just go to a YouTube video which was in English and British sign language, and they could access that at their own pace and make this creative arts activity and then come back and share that with the group on Facebook or in one of the Zoom sessions.  We’ve also had live picnics when we’re allowed to.  Last summer we had a couple of picnics where all the parents came along.  We were even on Blue Peter, Neil, and they all got their Blue Peter badges.  So that has been an absolutely glorious project to see developed. And it’s really important that, you know, as Steph has developed her role as youth theatre leader, she’s also started taking over a lot of the management of the youth theatre, and she certainly leads on the direction in terms of skills that she’s going to work on with the young people, amazing deaf practitioners that she might want to bring in to work with young people because we have funding for that as well, which is really important providing inspiration and role-modelling.  So she can choose leading deaf theatre practitioners to come and work alongside our young people, and she also, alongside Anna, plans and delivers all of the kind of performance work that the young people might like to do.  So in the, I think it was the half term, spring half term, they created a production called – was it the Little Mermaid in a Plastic Wonderland?  So they’d been to see a production at Christmas at Derby theatre called the Little Mermaid which had British sign language interpretation.  So they went as a group to see that online, which we paid for them to do.  And they were so inspired that they wanted to create their own performance.  And they did that online, in Zoom, with Steph and Anna and our amazing volunteers, and they created their own half hour – turned out to be half hour performance of the Little Mermaid with a twist.  So that was amazing. 

Elise Davison: 00:58:04
Yeah, it was gorgeous production.  Gorgeous, gorgeous.

Neil Hancock: 00:58:07
And this is a question that I ask all the guests who come on to my show, it’s the sort of main question, if you like.  What has been your greatest challenge in either your life and or your career to date?

Elise Davison: 00:58:22
Being a mum’s been my biggest challenge, I think.  And I think it’s the thing that continues to challenge me day by day by day and I never… I didn’t know how hard it would be but I also didn’t know how amazing it would be.  Yeah, I think that’s probably been my biggest challenge to date, has been all the beautiful adventures that that has brought into my life and continues to bring into my world and my life and, and then connected to that, balancing that with my job and my other love which is creating and making theatre.  I think that’s been one of the biggest challenges.

Beth House: 00:59:14
Yeah, I think I would sort of say similar really.  I’ve got four kids and it is hard working in the arts when you're not necessarily working 9:00 to 5:00 when the after school clubs are open and things.  But also, you know, it does bring amazing things like your kids get to see these amazing shows and meet all these brilliant actors, and like all of our children, Elise’s and mine and Louise’s who’s our general manager, they know a bit of British sign language, they're really deaf and disability aware and they, you know, they have all these experiences of seeing these performances, not Peeling...no they didn’t come see Peeling, that was too grown up for them.  But there’s also something else as well in balancing your own…  This is what I found difficult, I think, is balancing your own desires as an artist and a performer and a theatre maker to start with which is where I started, and the good of an organisation.  So I think that’s been really hard to kind of step back and keep reminding ourselves, or myself particularly, what’s the vision of Taking Flight and are we doing this because I think it’s a really nice idea and I like it, or are we doing it because it served the vision of the organisation, and that’s really hard I think when you have a background as a performer or an artist or a theatre maker in any kind of area and any respect, and you have all these things that you want to bring to that to be able to let go and say, it’s not about me, it’s not about my artistic desires or my own aims and goals as a human, it’s about the goals and aims of an organisation and how we best support that and how we best support other people to do their best work.  So it’s been challenging, I guess, over the years to separate out self from organisation because it kind of feels like it is us.  You know, Elise and I set this up as two performers together, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing I might add, it was literally like, “Let’s set up a company.”  And we’ve learned so much, you know, the learning curve was so steep.  And I think that because you're so entwined in that organisation and it’s a part of you, it’s really hard to then take a step back when you have other people become involved, your board members, your trustees, artists, other people who were interested and have a real stake in the organisation to step back and say, where does my desire and my needs and wants end, and where does the—what’s best for the organisation begin, and keep asking yourself those questions.  So that’s, yeah, I guess that’s what’s been the biggest challenge. 

Neil Hancock: 01:01:50
And what has been the most rewarding thing for you both about running your own company?

Beth House: 01:01:57
I would go back to, for me, especially in the early years when we were doing lots of outdoor theatre and it felt like we were a family, you know, we had lots of actors working for us that we’ve got to know over the years, like yourself, Neil, and you know, people would be on tour with us and our kids would be on tour or they’d come out and see shows, and it really felt like a family and it really felt like we were making something, and we were kind of…  Because we were so at one with our audiences because we could see them, they were right there in front of us and as they were leaving the performances, they would talk to us and they would stay in touch with us, it felt really like we were a family, and I’m really glad that my kids got to grow up in that environment.  So that, I would say, has been the most rewarding thing for me, personally.  

Elise Davison: 01:02:47
Yeah, I’m trying to put my finger on what it would be, actually, Neil.  I think each thing that Taking Flight does brings with it, just huge amounts of rewards in lots of different ways.  And I think seeing…  It’s always been about the audience for me, even when I was a performer, you know, it’s always been about knowing that somebody’s enjoyed something or has been moved by something or has felt something or felt connected or felt taken away from stuff for a minute, you know, it’s always been about that.  So I guess, whenever we’ve managed to do anything that has achieved that, that’s always super, super, super rewarding.  And that you can't… it’s really hard to put into words what that feels like, but it’s a really… it’s a really lovely feeling to think that you’ve touched somebody and that they’ve had an experience that you’ve been part of in some way.  I couldn't really single it down to a single moment, but that kind of is what’s been rewarding for me.  And I think in so many ways as well, you know, we started from such a tiny spark of an idea that the fact that, that one, we’re still here and that the company is growing and will continue to grow way past when we’re both working for the company, you know, it will continue to grow.  And I think what’s really rewarding is that, you know, we’ve been part of putting those foundations in place and then now, you know, for the future we can watch it grow and then, then watch it take off, and go on to do many, many brilliant, brilliant things.  But I think that’s a really lovely thing to have been part of.   

Neil Hancock: 01:04:56
And on that note, Elise, Beth, thank you for joining me today, and thank you for coming onto my show and chatting about your fantastic company.

Beth House: 01:05:06
Thank you so much for having us, Neil.  I’ve really enjoyed this opportunity to reflect on the journey, so thank you so much for inviting us on.

Elise Davison: 01:05:13
Thank you, Neil.  Thank you very much.  It’s been lovely to chat to you.

Neil Hancock: 01:05:16
And for those people listening who would like to find our more about Taking Flight, please do visit their website which is www.takingflighttheatre.org.uk.  Thank you very much. 

(Music plays)

Beth House: 01:05:28
Thank you. 

Neil Hancock: 01:05:30
Since this episode was recorded, Beth House has left Taking Flight and is now executive producer at Operasonic, and co-executive director at Citrus Arts.  Elise is currently rehearsing Taking Flight’s next production, Road by Jim Cartwright.  And if you’d like to contact Taking Flight, please email marketing@takingflighttheatre.co.uk. And once again, their website is www.takingflighttheatre.org.uk.  If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, please follow me on Twitter: @neilonwheelspod; or Instagram: theneilonwheels podcast.  Until next time.   

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Duration: 66 minutes 15 seconds