New Perspectives delivers “postcard drama”

Published: 3 July 2020
Reporter: Steve Orme

"Bringing art to the doorstep": Love From Cleethorpes

Nottingham-based New Perspectives has devised a novel way of reaching isolated audiences: through a drama written on a series of specially designed postcards.

Love From Cleethorpes will be a six-part “postcard drama” in which a different card will arrive through letterboxes each day. The audience member will read each card and piece together a relationship between two people told over a 30-year correspondence as they travel from Cleethorpes to Nottingham via New York.

New Perspectives’ artistic director Jack McNamara, who wrote and devised the drama, said, “rural touring is such a personal, tactile medium: our van arrives in a village, our company interacts with its community, we share the same space and sense of occasion.

“At a time when such activity has been put on hold, I wanted to create something that offered our audiences a similarly up-close experience. Putting theatre online is fine but it does little to replicate that sense of something special being there in front of you that you can touch.

“The postcard is a beautiful medium, able to say so much with such a small window. And there is innate drama in waiting for something to arrive in the post, finding something just for you and studying it to piece together a dramatic narrative.

“We hope to be back on the road soon but until then we hope this is a way of continuing to reach our audiences and bring exciting art literally to their doorstep.”

The postcards will be mailed free of charge from 10 August. Anyone can sign up at the New Perspectives web site.

Also off-screen, New Perspective’s audio series PlacePrints by David Rudkin is available on podcast apps and the company’s trilogy The Spirit is available to stream. Originally performed at Battersea Arts Centre in 2020, The Spirit features performances from “one of Europe’s most distinctive and radical performance artists” Thibault Delferiere. The trilogy is available until 12 July on BAC’s YouTube channel.

*Some links, including Amazon, Stageplays.com, ATG Tickets, LOVEtheatre, BTG Tickets, Ticketmaster, The Ticket Factory, LW Theatres and QuayTickets, are affiliate links for which BTG may earn a small fee at no extra cost to the purchaser.

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