Full Circle: Notes from The Den

Full Circle: Notes from The Den by Joshua Val Martin

This year marks the Royal Exchange Theatre’s 50th Anniversary Season. Since 2019, they’ve toured their ‘Local Exchange’ programme, in which The Den (made with cardboard and love), pitches up in a Greater Manchester area to host a festival curated by arts and culture ambassadors local to the place.

About this time last year, I was commissioned to write ‘A Thing’ for The Den. Great! ‘A Thing’ sadly fell through.

Not Great!

The thought of a Josh shaped hole unbearable, it was suggested I be a ‘resident writer’ and write A Thing for the festival. Something to celebrate The Den? Or Tameside? No one knew.

I’d work it out.

But whatever it was would be shared at the The Den’s closing ceremony.

***

I’d never even been to Stalybridge before.
I’d been to Ashton of course: Since my parents, sister and two dogs squeezed into a bungalow on an over-55s estate there, a few years ago. But Ashton isn’t Stalybridge. Nor Denton, Mossley, Dukinfield or Hyde…

“You must think of Tameside differently from other boroughs” the Ambassadors told me. Because before 1974, in what’s modern day Tameside, you’d have found three different counties, countless accents, industries, and transport systems…

I’d a lot to learn.

***

Of course, I’d heard of “Stalyvegas”

I always imagined this was ironic, a nickname-cum-epitaph in memory of the glory days…

How wrong I was: Opening night and the town was packed, chasing the promise of May’s blistering heat.

(And it was this night, I fostered my dream, of one day managing to bag a table at Café Continental).

***

For so long, I’d pined for the freedom to write anything,

‘Anything!’

Then on arrival… I’d a creeping worry I’d hit the ‘middle button’ and write performance poetry full of half rhymes – the sort you find in adverts for banks. The Den deserved better.

***

So, I put the worry on pause, and launched myself into the festival’s offerings…

I went incognito – under cover, like I was Louis Theroux of The Den. But instead of investigating neo-Nazis or celebrities –
My subjects would include everything from Improv classes to Circus skills.

(I did ask the Royal Exchange for a staff lanyard at one point, when I thought how it may look to have a 33-year-old man
making small talk on Phoebe Foxtrot’s crafts table, with half a dozen infants)

***

What better job! No better people speaking freely, not knowing why I was there (nor caring). So I’d permission to be nosey with everyone: The box office, bartenders, techies, teachers, security, participants, punters, producers, actors, Ambassadors…

It made me think many moons back, when Matthew Xia, then Associate Director of the Royal Exchange, proselytised over an IPA:

“What is a theatre but people?”

Which I thought, back then, might sell well in the theatre shop, on a tote bag. Matthew’d say that maybe the great weight afforded to the stage makers, could be redirected to those we meet before the house lights go down: Because it’s their ‘who’ and ‘how’, that are a theatre’s DNA.

***

Slight Tangent:

Does anyone remember the Royal Exchange’s ‘friends’? A community of volunteers who’d welcome visitors to the building, giving impromptu tours, programme notes, and sometimes their review of the current production. They set the tone, and gave the whole place a face.

One such ‘friend’ being the amazing Norman.

In the play ‘Cold Chips And Pick N Mix’, written for the Cheetham Hill Den Festival, Sonia Jalaly writes:

“It’s in knowing Norman Goodman
Or knowing someone who knows Norman Goodman
Or knowing someone who knows someone who knows Norman Goodman.”

***

One of the people who was The Den, for me, was Katy:

Katy juggles jobs, and a son with ADHD, Katy’s happy place was when working at the Royal Exchange.

She’d started with the RET, after completing a Front of House training scheme…
at Tameside’s previous Den Festival!

Now?

Katy was here, working, organising this year’s Front of House training scheme. Katy said:

“I’ve come full circle”

Little did I know then how this refrain

“I’ve come full circle”

Would stalk me throughout the festival.

First Katy. Then Joe, from Global Grooves. Then Marilyn, who’d started by joining the elder’s company. Every day, another circle added to my notes, not aware that I’d already started a song.

***

It’s but a mental baby step – going from ‘full circle’, to thinking of the Royal Exchange Theatre’s geometry and that of its cardboard little sister, The Den.

In my early-20s, working at the New Vic theatre, Artistic Director Theresa Heskins had pointed to her temple, and told me a ‘theatre-in-the-round’ doesn’t start with architecture – but was conceived for the mind…

A theatre where hierarchy is flattened: A space that invites participants, in which to bear witness to one another.

Young Josh nodded hoping to understand Theresa, burying the thought that at theatres in-the-round I mostly witnessed young parents opposite nodding off at the matinee or a finger conspicuously tucking into a nostril.

***

Nonetheless, equipped with the memory of this idealism, I settled on writing a song –

Ending the festival sat in The Den as if round a campfire, for a song full of accidental poetry pulled from true moments, me singing back to people who’d unknowingly gifted me the words –

Full circle

(Full disclosure: I’d originally wanted to conclude with a conga line – someone muttered something about paperwork, but I think the consensus was I’d got carried away)

***

I’d not predicted this to be one of the most gratifying moments of my career accompanied on keys by my old friend and collaborator Joshua Dawson.

Each verse of the song sketches a different person’s ‘full circle’ story – Katy, Joe, Chloe, Sara, Marilyn, Rev… And many others who made The Den what it was.

I’d sing their names, then find them in the audience – a flash of surprise, unaware that they and the moments we’d shared
would feature in it. After their eyes widened, came a teasing nudge from a neighbour before tears for having been Seen –

(Never have I been quite so happy, to make so many cry)

All these people who’d told me they’d come ‘full circle’ hadn’t said it because they’d somehow reached the top, but because ‘the round’ had widened the theatre to include them.

Whilst I never did manage to get a table at Café Continental, I did have a front row seat to all these circles, seeing who the Royal Exchange really is, in all these people.

The Den travelled to Tameside, having been before to Leigh, Cheetham Hill, Rochdale, East Manchester…

All the people of Greater Manchester reimagining the theatre as participants, audiences, storytellers and staff members.

Perhaps, in its 50^th anniversary season, it’s the Royal Exchange Theatre, that has come full circle.