Ess & Jen chat about making invitations

Ess & Jen chat about making invitations

Recorded 21st May 2026 Jen used her good mic, and we remembered to both record locally to Audacity, but Jen forgot to use headphones. It’s a process. The transcripts can get shortened here and on podcast streaming apps, but you can download a free PDF of the full transcript for this episode on Gumroad by clicking here [https://jenifertoksvig.gumroad.com/l/pebxe]. JEN: Shall we have a chat? ESS: Let’s have a chat. Uh… JEN: So, the thing that’s on my mind this week… Do you have a thing? ESS: Uh huh? JEN: Do you have a thing? ESS: No, I don’t. I was just about to say I don’t really… I don’t really have a chat. JEN: That’s cool. ESS: So I’m hoping you do. JEN: I have a chat. ESS: [chuckling] JEN: So, the thing that’s on my mind this week is… I am in a group of writers, and somebody posted a thing about a poetry competition, um, which I asked you about, and… because I’m not familiar with how that… with the good industry standards around how poetry competitions work, and I wanted to talk more with this person about this thing, and then I realised that I would just be hounding this person, and it wasn’t really about them, it was about the broader issue of invitations. So I’d like to talk about invitations. And, as an aside, it made me remember that I have an alphabet of The Copenhagen Interpretation [https://thecopenhageninterpretation.co.uk/] in Workflowy [http://workflowy.com]. So, I went to look under ‘I’ for invitation, and there it was, [both laugh] so I have some notes about it, but also, if we are ever stuck for a thing to chat about, we… you could just give me a letter of the alphabet, and we could pick a thing from my alphabet and talk about it. [laughs] ESS: Great, love it. JEN: So, invitations is today’s thing. Um, so, and this… this came about… a long time ago I started thinking about how we make invitations in the industry, because, uh, competitions are a big invitation that are made in the industry across the board, I mean to writers in all genres. ESS: Mmhm. JEN: And, uh, and what I was seeing was… the word ‘opportunity’ being used, and that, you know, and ‘This will be great for you’, and basically it’s great for the people who are making the invitation and not great for the people who are responding to the invitation, but the language used makes it sound like it’s… “a fantastic opportunity, career-wise…” ESS: Yep. JEN: Yeah, that. ESS: [chuckles] JEN: So, so, and the, the thing that, uh, made me speak to the competition guy the other day is, um… they were offering something other than money. Uh, and… uh, and, and I’m not going to say what they were offering because I don’t wanna… this isn’t about them specifically, but it is about value. So I went to the Writers Guild and said, “This is happening. These are awful invitations” and, um, the very brilliant people who work there talked with me until we realised that, um… it’s about making… it’s about deciding whether it’s a… a commission, a cut-price commission, or a competition. So, sometimes, competitions are put out there, and basically it’s the company that can’t afford to do a proper commission fee, so they’re putting it out as a competition, so they get loads of entries and things, and they get to pick what they want, and then publish it, and then everybody feels lucky because they won something. And no money changes hands, and it’s terrible. ESS: Yeah. JEN: Um… and what was on offer here… I said to you… I put it in front of you and said, “Is this right?” And you said, “There should be some money in this empty space here”. [Both laugh] And uh, instead there’s some, some phrase that makes it sound like it’s a really great… thing for furthering your career, and actually, when you examine that really great thing, it is, it’s kind of empty and made of air. ESS: Yeah. JEN: And not really great at all, or just not in any… not given in any detail. ESS: Yeah. I think it’s also just thinking back about that, the call out that you sent me, it’s the not saying specific… so it didn’t say, “There is no money”. It didn’t say, “The first prize is not paid, but it’s a publication opportunity”. It just didn’t say anything. And I think that’s where I get irritated, because it’s like… you, you not saying explicitly, “This is an unpaid opportunity”, means you know… like, you know that’s not cool, and you think by just not talking about it, somehow we won’t notice. JEN: Yeah, we won’t, we won’t realise that there’s that it’s made of air and smoke and mirrors, ESS: Yeah. JEN: Um, yeah. And the thing that irritates me is… I mean, the word ‘opportunity’ irritates me, because it never is. Anytime anybody uses that word, it literally is not an opportunity for the person that they’re referencing. Um… but the thing that irritates me is… people say… I’m trying to think of an example of what it could be without, without making it be particular to this thing. So, for example, if you… often, what’s offered is, like, dramaturgy or… editing support, or some kind of role. Some time with a person who does a role that you don’t ever get in your life unless you are in a professional situation. So, let’s say it’s, um… let’s say it’s like… you get to talk to this person who will help you do some editing of your work, or whatever. Say you get to talk to a dramaturg if you’re a theatre maker. ESS: Yeah. JEN: And it might say, “You get some dramaturgy” and then, and that’s it, that’s all it says. It doesn’t say, like, “It’s a five minute conversation with someone”. It doesn’t say who it’s with. It could be, you know, the guy behind the bar thinks he’s really good with story, and you get to chat to him over a pint. And that might be amazing! Who knows? Who knows what it is?! [laughing] ESS: Yeah. JEN: Nobody knows! They use the word. They, they mention the role, they don’t say who it is, or what experience they have. And, and even then, your relationship with any role, an editor, a dramaturg, with a producer, with, you know… they’re all still personal relationships, so there’s no guarantee that it will be of any value to you. And the thing I find hardest is… it’s really obvious to me, that. If you say to me, “You’ll get £300”, I know exactly what the value of that is in my life. If you say to me, “You’ll get some dramaturgy”, I have no idea what the value of that in my life is, other than, “Oh, that’s a word I recognise, and professionals encounter that word and that role, and therefore it must be valuable to me”. Which is… bollocks. And, and there’s often an argument given as well… that, that, “Oh, we’re reaching out to people who are early career, so it will definitely be of benefit to them, because they have nothing, so how could it not?” ESS: Yeah. JEN: … is the argument given. And it, and it makes me want to say, ”Yeah, people who are early career are going to have zero idea of how to value this. They’re going to have no idea of what the value of this might be, so they’re going to have no idea whether it’s worth £300 or not, to them”, you know. ESS: Yeah. JEN: So that’s even worse. That’s worse! Help me with this. How do we make people make better invitations? [Both chuckle] ESS: Yeah. I think… JEN: Shall I see what’s in the alphabet? ESS: Yeah, go on, let’s read that out. JEN: So, under ‘invitation’ in the alphabet, I’ve written that it’s an Aspect of work, and Aspects are big important things. So, I clearly think it’s quite important. ESS: Yeah. JEN: “How do we invite people to join us and make them excited and comfortable enough to share info with us at the point of booking?” So, this is about inviting people to come to Copenhagen Interpretation events. ESS: Uh huh. JEN: But it’s the same thing. How do I make people feel comfortable enough to share their work with me if I’m inviting it in competition? I’ve been trying to use the phrase ‘put forward’: “If you would like to put your work forward…” ESS: Mmhm. JEN: Rather than ‘submit’, which just feels too… kinky, frankly. [Ess chuckles] Like, I don’t want people to be on their knees holding their work above their head with their eyes down. ESS: Yeah. JEN: Do you know what I mean? ESS: Yeah yeah. Totally. JEN: That’s a terrible word to use. ESS: Yeah, yeah: “submitting applications”. [Makes little choked noise] JEN: So, that. ESS: I think… okay… JEN: How do we make people confident enough to share their work… at the start? ESS: So, here’s the thought. So, I know we’ve talked, when we’ve talked about Copenhagen activities, projects happening, that thing of, like, who is paid to be in the room, and who is paying to be in the room? And that’s all part of that kind of invitational process. And there’s something about the kind of quotes “audience” of people who are paying to be in the room, and the air quotes “performers or artists” are the people who are being paid to be in the room. But as soon as you start to smoosh that relationship around, which I think Copenhagen does… JEN: Yeah. ESS: But I think also things like poetry competition um… entry invitations also kind of smoosh that around. And what they’re… the, like, the function of the ‘paying to enter’ is… basically everyone who’s entering is putting into the pot that the prize winner ultimately wins. JEN: Yes. ESS: So it’s kind of like a lottery, but where it’s not randomly selected, it’s judged. JEN: Yes. ESS: Um, but ultimately you’re all putting into a pot, someone gets to walk away with the whole pot. And I think that… JEN: If you’re paying, yeah. If you’re paying to enter, yeah. ESS: Yeah. But in the case of a poetry competition, everyone is doing a whole load of labour to write their poem, and put it in… JEN: Yeah. ESS: … in the hope that they are the person that walks away with the pot. JEN: Yep. ESS: And I think the difference… JEN: That’s really important, that the pot is made of labour, in that instance. ESS: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. JEN: But there’s still a pot of stuff that gets taken away by one person. ESS: Yeah. And then you’re like: well, what’s the sort of alternative to that? Where we’re all putting into the pot, but we all are guaranteed something out of the pot as well. So then it’s kind of like, oh, it’s an open call… and then they have to try and publish 1000 poems or something. So, like, the tricky relationships around who’s… yeah, who’s fundamentally paying for that publication to happen? But I also, I appreciate that running a small press is really difficult, and, like, the economics of that are really hard, but the economics being hard shouldn’t stop it from happening. So, it is a, it is a tricky kind of cycle around. And I think with the Copenhagen Interpretation, to the audience who might be putting some money in the pot to make the projects happen… feels like… quite a sort of… there’s like a mutual aid in there, right? You’re putting money into the pot, but you know that you’re going to get something out of it. JEN: Yep. ESS: Which is a different relationship to putting your poem… paying to put your poem into a pot where you might get nothing. And almost all those competitions… and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one saying, “We’ll give a bit of feedback to everyone who puts in a poem”, because that’s an amount of labour they can’t afford to offer. JEN: Well yeah, and there’s also no guarantee that, you know, that that’s going to be of value to anyone, as well. ESS: Yeah. Yeah yeah. JEN: Like, there’s that, too, isn’t there? Like, who’s doing it? What… how useful is it to me at this stage of my writing? Maybe this is a poem I wrote a long time ago, I don’t need feedback for it, I just… you know. And I totally get it that I’m very sensitive in, in competitive stuff, and that there are people who can just… who can just apply for funding, and if they don’t get it, they’re fine, and they move on, and they apply again. ESS: Yeah. JEN: Like, I know those mythical people exist, and I’m at the other end of the spectrum, where if I get rejected from something, I stop work for a year. So, you know, there’s… there’s a whole spectrum, isn’t there, of that as well. ESS: Absolutely. JEN: So, so my wish is to craft invitations in a way that any invitation we make in the industry holds us in a nicer space, and is at least clear… ESS: Mm. JEN: … and is at least informative, and is at least aware of itself. Self-aware invitations is what, is really what I’m looking for. ESS: Yeah. I… I think there’s also… in terms of, like, that being accessible and inclusive, there’s something about noticing the amount of labour you’re asking someone to do in order to respond to that invitation. So funding applications drive me insane, right? The amount of… I don’t have the stats in front of me, but this is a bit of research I really want to go and do. How much does it cost the Arts Council to have all of those panels sitting in judgement on people’s applications, and how much unpaid labour goes into making those applications? And… sorry, I don’t want to just come for Arts Council. Um… I suppose they’re like the biggest, most kind of state sanctioned version of that… JEN: Yeah, that everyone knows about, yeah. ESS: But all of, like, all the arts funding that I’m aware of runs the… roughly the same model, where someone puts in a load of unpaid labour to put in an application form that is usually fairly complex, uses f*****g character counts… JEN: Yes! ESS: … that are literally… I’m, like, on a one-person campaign. I hate them so much. They are such a waste of everybody’s head space and energy and time. And there is a ridiculous, ridiculous thing to have done. Like, word counts, fine. I understand you want to limit how much people have to read to process the application. But here’s the thing, like, all of that processing of the application is a waste of people’s time. JEN: Mmhm. ESS: Everyone is putting… it’s like, just trust. JEN: Mmhm. ESS: People are putting in for good projects, they’ve thought it through, like… give us some guidance to help, like, plan our projects well, cool. Just pull it out of a hat. JEN: Mm. ESS: Like, just be honest. JEN: Mm. ESS: There’s not enough money to fund all of these projects. JEN: Mm. ESS: All of these projects have really fundable aspects to them. The, like, vast majority of them are being proposed by people who care, who are figuring out how to do things, like, to the best of their ability, and are well intentioned. And… just save everyone the labour… JEN: Yeah. Just save everyone. On both sides. ESS: Just save yourselves the time, save us the time. And then you’re also not… you know that thing where the feedback from a rejection is so often useless, because again, like, no one’s got the capacity to really give detailed feedback. And you can reapply and reapply and reapply… you know, the… there’s things that I’ve applied for, like, multiple times, where I’ve really done what they’ve asked me to do in the feedback, where I’ve been lucky enough to get quite detailed feedback, but it’s never enough. It’s never enough. Or the criterias have changed, or the judging panel’s changed, and they want different things, and you end up getting contradictory feedback, blah blah blah blah blah. It sucks. JEN: It does. ESS: So I’m like, just… if it was just random, I’m fine with that. JEN: Yeah. ESS: I’m honestly fine with that. JEN: Yep. It wasn’t me this time. ESS: Yeah. JEN: I’ll give it a go next time. ESS: Yeah. JEN: Maybe randomly it’ll be me next time. ESS: Yeah. And also, there might be more money in the pot because it’s not paying for hundreds of man-hours of people reading through all of these applications, and… JEN: Yeah yeah yeah. ESS: Anyway. That’s… which is a thing that happened at Devoted & Disgruntled [https://www.devotedanddisgruntled.com/] this year, is… there was a pot in the middle of money… JEN : I love this. ESS: That people could chip into if they wanted to. I think Improbable [https://www.improbable.co.uk/] started it off with like £500. And it was, like, if you want to chip in, do it. If you don’t, it’s absolutely… like, it was all anonymous. It wasn’t like you had to prove anything by doing it. And if you wanted to put a project, propose a project, you literally just wrote the name of the project and your name. You didn’t have to pitch it, you didn’t have to prove it. You literally just gave it an identifying something, and your name, so that there was a way of finding you. And then at the end of the Monday, they were just pulled out of a hat. And whoever got pulled out of the hat got all of the money. JEN: It’s brilliant. ESS: Which was a bit over £1000, I think, at the end. JEN: It’s brilliant. ESS: And it… it felt really good… that no-one… JEN: And nobody’s offended. No-one is rejected. ESS: No. Yeah. JEN: That’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s the thing. ESS: That’s the thing. It’s not a rejection. It’s just luck. JEN: I just… that;s the thing that… Okay. So. I’m gonna… you made me think of a thing, so I’m gonna just jump back to that. It’s really interesting to talk about, um… the people who pay to come into the room and the people who are paid to be in the room. Because… oh, we’re jumping around lots of subjects today, but that’s good, I like it. ESS: It’s fine. Do it. It’s a chat. [chuckles] JEN: Um. So… yes, it’s smooshed about in ‘Copenhagen’. Because… we invite participants to play characters, for example. So there might be two people standing next to each other, both of them playing a character, and you cannot tell the difference between their roles in their participation in this thing, but one of them has paid, and one of them is being paid. And it’s taken me a long, long time… and I’m still working on how that works, and how it’s right, and why it’s right. But, um, the main thing that I see is commitment. So… I… the participants are free to come and go. If somebody just needs to go, whenever they want, or they only want to stay for five minutes, or whatever… ESS: Mmhm. JEN: … they can come and go as they please, so that’s fine. It’s just an open door. So what they pay for is not, um… they don’t pay to take part, so much, in my head, as they… it’s like, uh, entry to a museum or a gallery. You pay an entry ticket, which allows you access to everything, and it’s up to you when you come and go, and so on. It… ESS: Yeah. JEN: Or like a membership thing. Um… that’s it: you have access to it and then you can do what you like with it. Whereas if, if somebody’s in the room holding a narrative structure that I need them to hold, then I’m paying them. Because that’s a commitment of time and focus. So, that’s my current thinking on… how that works. You either pay to have access to something, to be a member of it, to be present in it, but you don’t have to commit to it, or you commit to me that you will hold a certain structural aspect of this whole thing, and therefore I pay you to keep… to be able to keep that commitment. ESS: Yeah. JEN: That’s my current thinking. ESS: That makes sense to me. Invitation, obligation. JEN: Yeah. It’s diff… it’s… yeah, exactly that. It’s… one is, one is an invitation to come in and join us for the party, but you don’t have to stay, and if you want to be in the kitchen and play with the dog all day, that’s fine. And the other one is… [laughing] please serve drinks… ESS: Yeah. JEN: Or please play music… ESS: Yeah yeah. JEN: Or please go round and make sure everyone’s okay, or… whatever the role is. You know. That’s a thing that you… you also are at the party, but you are hanging on to this thing for me… ESS: Mm. JEN: … because I can’t do all of the things. So yeah, that. Okay, I’m going back to the alphabet. So… um… “How can we make more and more invitations in order to facilitate more and more access to making work, so we can support big inclusion?” - is a question in the alphabet. And I’ve written underneath, “The answer is: publish soon, publish, just publish. [Ess laughs] Make it be like Open Space [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_space_technology] and set it free”. This is from when you and I went and had margaritas. Do you remember this? ESS: Oh yeah! JEN: You and I went and had margaritas - a lot! - in the middle of the day one day, because we decided we could. Do you remember this? In the City. ESS: Yeah, yeah I do. JEN: And, um… I was talking about The Copenhagen Interpretation. This is long, long ago. And you said, “Why aren’t you just publishing it? [both laugh] Why don’t you just put it out there?” Um… and that’s right, I think. I think putting work out there is an invitation… to people. ESS: Yeah. JEN: This is why I wanted us to just do this. This is an invitation to people to think about these things, or to talk about these things, or whatever. Or just to hear us witter on. {Ess laughs] Like… this is an invitation. Putting stuff out there is an invitation. ESS: Yeah. JEN: And I think that’s really important. Um… whereas sending stuff into a competition isn’t necessarily an invitation, and it should be. If I put my work forward to a competition, it should be an invitation to those people to collaborate with me, and the least you can do when someone makes a nice invitation like that is to reply nicely. [laughs] ESS: Ohh, d’you know, I think in my head it’s, it’s really… that’s so interesting, I love that you’ve just flipped that, because for me it’s like the invitation is coming from… JEN: Exactly. ESS: … the publisher… JEN: And that’s how it’s always framed. ESS: But actually, I am inviting… JEN: Yep. ESS: Um… [gasps] Mind-blown. JEN: When… no. When I gather… I discovered that from… I realised that from gathering fairytales [https://www.jenifertoksvig.com/blog]. Like the first time I gathered a fairytale… well, the first time I did it, I made a room full of people cry, which wasn’t the intention at all, and took me very much by surprise. [Both chuckle] Especially since I was in a drama school, and I try and hold a really careful space. [laughs] ESS: Yeah. JEN: And uh… there was lots of crying. But that was okay. It was okay. Um… but when I started doing… gathering just one-on-one, I very quickly started saying at the end, “It’s a real privilege to be invited into a space like this by somebody, and I’m always really grateful”. Because it is. And when I share my work with someone, I’m not just sharing… this is making me feel tearful, which is interesting. I’m not just sharing… I’m not just saying, “Please love me”. Because of course I’m also saying that, because we all do when we put ourselves out there, we’re all saying, “Please tell me I’m of value”. But I’m also saying, “You could work with me. Here’s an open door for you to come and look at my… ESS: Yeah. JEN: … very personal stuff. That I very personally crafted.” ESS: Yeah. JEN: “Do you want to come and play?” Um… and the fact that responses don’t ever acknowledge that… makes me crazy. ESS: It is… yeah. JEN: And there are ways that we could.. I… I just think… I could spend, you know, some time just sitting down and thinking, how do we write letters that say, “We can’t work with you this time… but dear gods, thank you for letting us into your work…” ESS: Yeah. JEN: … and, you know, “That’s incredible. That’s an incredible invitation. It’s a privilege.” Um… yeah. So that. Okay. The next thing says… [laughs] it says, “The answer is ‘publish soon’”. So what happens is I write little… I have a little thought and I go and find the right place in the alphabet to write it down, and often things don’t make sense afterwards. And my answer to, “The answer is ‘publish soon’” is: “Which means the financial model really needs to be solid and inclusive”. [Makes noise of exasperation. Ess chuckles.] So we can talk about money another day. Um… “How do we invite people to be honest with regard to safeguarding?”... is a big question that is a difficult thing. That we probably shouldn’t address today, and should give it its own space. But there is a thing that says, “Make your invitation as open and accessible as possible, so that any answer is welcome in response to it, even if it’s the most extremely random one you can think of”. So I think that’s really important. And that’s why counting characters is the most defined version of controlling the response that you get. ESS: Yeah. Yeah. JEN: But it’s not just that. It’s, it’s foundations that say… because I’ve been helping, you know, I’ve been supporting people that you and I know, who are… people applying for funding, and every foundation comes back and says, “In our form, here’s exactly what we care about, and here’s exactly what we want to fund, and here’s…” You know. The Jonathan Larson Foundation [https://americantheatrewing.org/program/jonathan-larson-grants/] in New York supports people who write musicals, and I think it’s true still - or it certainly used to be - that they would say, um, “If you get this award, you just get some money, and what you do with it is up to you.” ESS: I love that. JEN: “You can pay your bills with it, you can… you know, we don’t have any… we’re not going to say what a musical is. We’re not going to say…” Now I say that - there’s a caveat to that, because I have applied for things where I’ve gone, “Does it matter that I make this kind of interactive work, and, and it’s a musical because it still revolves around a song, but… it’s not, it doesn’t take the form of traditional fourth wall musical theatre?” and they go, “Yeah, yeah, that’s fine, that’s really exciting”, and then they just support traditional fourth wall musical theatre. ESS: Yeah. JEN: But um… but I think that… I think… I think it would be more exciting to say, “Put your work forward to us, please invite us to come and work with you. That would be a real privilege. Send the invitation in whatever way you want.” ESS: Mmhm. JEN: I once applied for a job with a gaming company by making a little game with a twenty-sided dice, where my CV was a toss up of what you rolled. [Ess laughs] So whatever you rolled told you what you got to read in my CV. So it’s possible that they would only read something that was completely irrelevant. ESS: Yeah. JEN: And as it was, they wrote to me to say we loved this, we rolled a twenty so we got to read your whole CV, and I was like, “No, that’s a shame!” [Both laugh] ESS: [laughing] “That’s a shame!” JEN: Anyway, um… I thought it’s a gamble anyway, I might as well make it more of a gamble. Um… they didn’t give me the job, but that’s okay. ESS: Oh what?! JEN: I wasn’t in any way qualified to do the job, but they were… friends, and they came back really nicely, and said we’d love to work with you. It’s just not this job, ESS: Yeah. But also the… just the knowledge that they actually did engage with what you were offering them… JEN: Yeah. ESS: … is, in terms of that way of like, mm… you know, sometimes people are like, you know, when you go for a job interview, they’ll be like, “You know, you’re interviewing them as much as they’re interviewing you”, and you… uh, yeah, sure… JEN: That’s b******t. ESS: … but like where’s the power? JEN: It’s b******t. ESS: Where’s the power? JEN: There’s no power. You sit on one side of a table opposite ten people, you know. ESS: [sounds of meowing are heard] Yeah. But if they’ve engaged with that offer that you’ve made… [more sounds of meowing] Sorry, I can hear the cat meowing…. JEN: Ahhh. ESS: … outside the window. Um… uh… they’ve engaged with the offer you’ve made… JEN: Yeah. ESS: … which is such a nice sign… JEN: Yeah. ESS: … that they’re probably people that you would… JEN: Yeah. ESS: … you know, enjoy to work with. JEN: Yeah. And we had a relationship, and we have a relationship, and it… that’s nice, that’s all I want, you know. ESS: Mm. JEN: Um… okay, it says here, “Anticipate the initial reluctance to answer. Everyone assumes that their contribution to the world will be judged and might be wrong. Reassure them immediately.” That doesn’t seem like a terrible… terribly difficult thing to do, to say, “It’s gonna… it’s difficult to put your work forward for something, um…” ESS: Yeah. JEN: “… but we’ll definitely do X if you, if you reach out to us. We will definitely feel this way about that. We will…” You know… ESS: Yeah. JEN: “We’ll see it as a privilege.” [Both chuckle] Like, I don’t think those are difficult things to say. Um… ESS: I think they’re really difficult things to hear, though. It’s, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Like, I think they don’t get said enough: absolutely agree. But I think there’s also something… like, my experience of facilitating Open Space events, for example, is… a huge amount of that job is just repeatedly giving people permission. JEN: Yep. ESS: Because everybody’s automatic response to being told, “You can do whatever you want and need to do”... JEN: Yeah. ESS: … is to go, “Right, yeah, but obviously I’m not allowed to XYZ”. JEN: Yeah. “But does that include this, that, and the other?” I remember Phelim saying that one of the things that Improbable have to do when they work with new people is break down all of the barriers and rules and things that people have absorbed working with, in other places, so that they can start to embrace Open Space in the room. ESS: Yeah. Totally. JEN: And same with me, you know, I have to say to people… I remember when we did Tiny Shows, we did Cinderella [https://tinyshowsmakers.wordpress.com/], and um… there were lots, there was lots of that permission seeking. Um, there was a composer who said, “I’ve just had a baby, so unfortunately I can’t join in”, and I was like, “Why not? Bring the baby. If you’re comfortable doing that, and it, and it’s okay…” ESS: Yeah. Yeah. JEN: “… you’d be more than welcome”. And she was like, “Really?!” I’m like, “Yeah!” And as it was, it was lovely. And she did some work, I think, but I would have been fine if she hadn’t, I’d have paid her anyway, to come into the room with the baby. ESS: Yeah. JEN: And everybody was like, “[gasp] Baby!” And it was lovely. [both laugh] Um… and then there was somebody else who said, “Um… I don’t feel comfortable working in this space, so I want to go home and work, and that doesn’t count”, and I was like, “Why doesn’t it… why doesn’t it count?” [both laughing] “Let’s go through that?” ESS: Yeah yeah yeah. JNEN: “It’s Open Space, you can do wherever…” ESS: Yeah. JEN: You know, wherever it happens… ESS: Yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time facilitating Open Space, just saying to people… [chuckles] my most common phrase was, “Who’s going to give you a detention [Jen laughs] if you do, or don’t, do that thing?” Um… and I quite enjoy… Kiz and I, uh, often just remind each other that we’re adults. There’s like that moment of, “Oh, can we go and do that?” or “Can I have that thing that I want?” and I’m like, “Well, you’re an adult. JEN: Yep. ESS: So literally no one’s going to tell you not to. JEN: Yep. ESS: And then… and Kiz also responds to me with the same JEN: Yeah. ESS: And Mal, as well. JEN: Yeah. ESS: Sorry, that’s… for people who don’t know who those people are: that’s my chosen family, with whom I live and love very much. And uh… yeah, like, how often all of us assume we’re in trouble… JEN: Yeah. ESS: Uh, assume we are not allowed… JEN: Yeah. ESS: … to do something, or be something, or… or not do something, as well, that thing of, like, um, saying no to… declining an invitation is also really hard… JEN: Yep. Yeah. ESS: Because we’re used to invitations, not really - they’re actually, they might look like an invitation, they might call themselves an invitation. A lot of the time, they’re not, really. JEN: No. No. I’ve gotten better… since I had my diagnosis [https://psychiatry-uk.com/the-overlap-between-adhd-and-autism-audhd/], I’ve gotten better at saying I would love to do that, and I’m not going to have the capacity, because I just, my brain doesn’t work that way, and I can’t, I’ll be overwhelmed. Um… yeah. And I’ve… like, there’s somebody I need to email, and I reached out to them, um, and made an invitation, and they came back really beautifully, and I haven’t responded yet, and… literally, because my ADHD has overwhelmed me in the last few days, so I haven’t done anything. Except talk to you, which is lovely. And um… and I’ll just write back and be, like, “Yeah, sorry, I got ADHD’d. Anyway, here I am now.” Because it’s just so much easier than people going, “Oh god, was it something I said? Did I…?” You know. No, it’s just me, being rubbish. [Ess chuckles] Um… [reading from the Copenhagen alphabet] “Be succinct, be clear, be transparent about why you are asking, and what you will do with the responses.” - is my last note under ‘Invitations’. ESS: Excellent. JEN: It’s true. ESS: Yeah. JEN: So… but also, “be succinct” is about… let’s go back to the poetry competition… is… the conversation I often have with people ends with them saying, “I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve been very open and honest, and we’ve said everything in our, in our ad for this invitation… for this competition. We’ve said that it’s no money, we’ve said that it’s, you know, you get published, and, and… you know, I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve said everything that…” You know. And everybody goes, “Yeah, they’ve said everything! They’ve said all the things!” And I’m like, “No, no you haven’t… you just haven’t thought through the things that you’re saying, ESS: Yeah. JEN: Like you haven’t explained about the dramaturgy and the value of it, you haven’t explained… we, you… don’t, don’t say, “This is a great opportunity for an early career writer”, say, “We understand this will probably only appeal to people who can, you know…” ESS: Mm. JEN: “… who are looking to do something like this, where it will be of value to them without the money… ESS: Yeah. JEN: “... and we anticipate that that might be the following situations…” and… ESS: Yeah. JEN: Just to acknowledge that, you know… ESS: It’s like the same… that same thing with the way people talk about access, where they say things like, “This event or this venue is fully accessible”. JEN: [chuckling] Yeah. ESS: That’s a really unhelpful thing to say. You say, “There are no steps to enter this venue.” JEN: Mmhm. ESS: There is a wheelchair accessible toilet with handrails. You like… you give them the facts… JEN: Yeah. ESS: … of, like… what is the situation, and then that person can decide if that’s accessible to them. JEN: Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah. ESS: It might be step-free and have a, have a wheelchair accessible toilet, but if what I really need is a silent space to decompress, then it’s not fully accessible to me. JEN: Yep. ESS: So you give people the facts, and I think it’s the same… JEN: It is. ESS: It’s the same thing with that, with that invitation of… “Here is what you get… JEN: Yeah. ESS: … if you ‘win’, and… yeah. You decide. JEN: I’m just gonna say that you made air quotes when you said ‘win’, and that’s fair enough. ESS: I did. Yeah. [chuckles] JEN: ‘Win.’ But it, but… the thing is, you want… presumably, if you’re doing a competition… so the, the Writers Guild… I’m not going to read out the whole thing but people can go to writersguild.org.uk [http://writersguild.org.uk] and click on ‘Get support’ and click on “Rates and Rights’, and then scroll down, and it says - right at the top - “Across our craft areas” guidelines: “Competition or Cut-Price Commission [https://writersguild.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/competition-or-cut-price-commission.pdf]”. And um… and it’s I think free to access. You don’t need to be a member, and you… I don’t think you even need to give an email address, but it talks about three areas, um… so, “A reputable competition will offer a prize or award that offers the winning writer at least one of the following: financial compensation, professional development, access to audience and/or industry specialists”. It’s really simple. Ess: Mmhm. JEN: You either get genuine money, or you get genuine professional development, or you get genuine access to something that will benefit your career in that way. And um… and I, as far as I’m concerned, the money in a competition should be more than a normal commission. Should be more… it should be more worth it… [chuckles]... than normal commission. And, and what happens is, people think they’ve put, “Oh yeah, you get access to an industry specialist”, or whatever, and then they just don’t… they stop there. They name the role: Dramaturgy! And then they stop there. ESS: Yeah. JEN: So there we are. That’s my thought for the day, was Invitations. ESS: I think my one… the one thing that I’d add to that is… all of those things that we want people to be clear about when making the invitation, I kind of want those at the top. JEN: Yeah. ESS: I appreciate you’re going to want to do an exciting blurb that encourages people to engage, but… JEN: And uh, and they always start with they want, as well. ESS: Yeah yeah. JEN: “Here’s what we want…” ESS: Yeah. But that thing where… when you’re like trawling through lots and lots of opportunities, to try and figure out which ones you want to apply to, the number of times that I’ve spent… like, a bunch of time reading a whole big blurb, getting excited about a thing, and then right at the bottom, the last thing it says is, “This opportunity is only available to X criteria of person”. And I’m like, “You just… you… Put that at the top, save me the time, because I’m already going to do a bunch of unpaid labour on this if it’s something I want to apply for. JEN: Yep. ESS: And that… being mindful of how you make an invitation is also telling people a bunch of stuff about how you’re then going to deal with the invitations that come back to you in response - to borrow your flip of that situation - but yeah, like if, if you’re not, if you’re not already taking care of my time in how you’ve made that invitation… JEN: Mm. ESS: I kind of know you’re not going to take care of my time in a bunch of other ways as well. JEN: And what’s interesting about this… absolutely, and at, and at the top, it’s not difficult to say, “Paid” or “Unpaid” but, but if it’s unpaid, “This is what you get, and the details are here…” ESS: Yeah. “Value of”. Yeah. JEN: You know, like it’s not hard to put all that stuff just in very brief at the top, and um… and if you’re making better invitations in that way, you would think you’re going to get a better response from people. ESS: Mm. Yeah. And hopefully… again it’s saving… it’s saving the time of the people putting that opportunity out there… JEN: Yeah. ESS: Because you hopefully would get fewer inappropriate responses as well. JEN: Yeah. You might just get invitations from people for whom this is an actual opportunity. ESS: Yeah. Yeah yeah. JEN: There we are. ESS: Ach, if we ruled the world, Jen. JEN: Um… it would be a terrible place! ESS: We wouldn’t be ruling. [Both laugh] JEN: We’d break it, if we ruled the world. ESS: It would be very nice. We wouldn’t get much done. JEN: No! ESS: [ref “We’d break it, if we ruled the world.”] No that’s not true, I don’t think that’s true. I think we’d be great. But we wouldn’t be ruling it, that’s the thing isn’t it? JEN: Yeah. ESS: I have no interest in being in charge. JEN: They’d put us in charge, and we’d be like… ESS: “No.” JEN: “And now we’re changing the rules, so there’s no rules like this. [both laughing] So no one person is in charge. So no two people are in charge. Um… thank you. That was a very nice chat. ESS: It was a nice chat. Thank you. Jen is Jenifer Toksvig [https://www.jenifertoksvig.com/], a writer, theatre-maker, and crafter. Her theatre process is called The Copenhagen Interpretation [https://thecopenhageninterpretation.co.uk/] (aka ‘Copenhagen’ in these conversations) and she makes a work of on-on-one theatre called The Fairytale Library [https://www.jenifertoksvig.com/blog] in which she gathers fairytale moments. Jen is AuDHD [https://psychiatry-uk.com/the-overlap-between-adhd-and-autism-audhd/]. Ess is SL Grange, a queer writer, theatre-maker and multi-disciplinary artist. An award-winning poet who writes feral poetries & other rages against the machine, you can buy their poetry here [https://poetrywales.co.uk/product/bodies-and-other-haunted-houses-winner-of-poetry-wales-pamphlet-competition-2021/]. Ess is also an Open Space producer and facilitator, and an audio describer. Their Substack is here [https://substack.com/@slgrange]. Ess works with Jen to develop The Copenhagen Interpretation, and is Copenhagen’s Navigator of Gathering. Links for things we mentioned workflowy.com [http://workflowy.com] is where Jen keeps the Copenhagen alphabet Writers Guild of Great Britain’s guideline: Competition or Cut-Price Commission? [https://writersguild.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/competition-or-cut-price-commission.pdf] Improbable theatre company [https://www.improbable.co.uk/] who host Devoted & Disgruntled [https://www.devotedanddisgruntled.com/] using Open Space Technology [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_space_technology] Tiny Shows: Cinderella [https://tinyshowsmakers.wordpress.com/] that Jen made using Open Space Jonathan Larson Foundation [https://americantheatrewing.org/program/jonathan-larson-grants/] who support musical theatre writers Fun fact: if you type ‘D20’ into Google, it will roll a twenty-sided dice for you. You can also ask Google to ‘flip a coin’. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jenifertoksvig.substack.com [https://jenifertoksvig.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ess & Jen chat again

Recorded 5th May 2026 Ess Grange [https://substack.com/@slgrange] and Jen Toksvig [https://jenifertoksvig.substack.com/] chat about when and how participatory community rituals became boundaried theatre. Ess used her fancy recording booth but Jen couldn’t figure out how to make her good mic work, plus we forgot to record both sides of this with Audacity, so the sound is still a bit s**t. Hey ho. JEN: So we started talking yesterday about whose fault it is… [both laugh] that theatre is inaccessible. Um… and… and you blamed Shakespeare [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare], which made me laugh but… I mean, it is a lot to do with Shakespeare, but I… we talked about Romans and Greeks, and I don’t know enough about theatre history, so I went and looked up some stuff. ESS: Oh nice. JEN: And it’s all f*****g Thespis’s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thespis] fault. ESS: Is it?! JEN: That’s what I discovered. ESS: Thespis. JEN: So Thespis was the first person, apparently, to step out of the chorus [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_chorus] and have a chat with the leader of the chorus, which I think is just rude. I don’t know if he warned anyone he was going to do it. I like to think he didn’t warn anyone, and he just stepped out and started talking, and the rest of them in the chorus were like, “This is awkward.” [both laugh] “What are we supposed to do with this?!” ESS: But what… I mean… was he talking… was he doing the thing that you have mentioned that you want to do, of just asking some questions… of the characters… about what’s going on? JEN: No. No, he was doing different voices for the characters. ESS: Oh! JEN: Rude. ESS: Mono… manologuing. JEN: Yeah. Manologuing. ESS: Mid-chorus. JEN: That’s a really good way to put it. So… so what happened was… now I’m going to badly represent theatre history and somebody should correct me, but apparently there was a City Dionysia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysia#City_Dionysia], which was a big official state-funded competition. And… um, run… run by a tyrant [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisistratus], obviously, because it’s all about tyrants. ESS: Okay. JEN: And… er, and there was before that… the Dionysian rites [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Dionysus], which were communal and collective and localised and never the same twice… not ever set, just like… ESS: Improv. JEN: You know, more Bacchannalian [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacchanalia], I would imagine. ESS: Yeah. JEN: And um… and then they had this competition for storytelling. And instead of just a chorus and the person leading the chorus, who never played the characters, Thespis - that f****r - stepped out and started doing voices of characters and talked to the leader of the chorus. And then Aeschylus [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeschylus], I’m going to say (because I can say that, and it’s a nice thing to say) Aeschylus added another person playing characters, Socrates or someone else [actually Sophocles [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophocles]!] added another person. And before you know it, we’ve got, you know, RADA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Academy_of_Dramatic_Art] costing a lot of money. [Ess laughs] So, er, that’s how that went. ESS: Wow. And do you know what the… like, were the audiences… like, in the… JEN: Shocked and appalled! [both laugh] ESS: In the… in the Dionysian / Bacchanalian rites, was that very much, like, people can make noise and move around and…? JEN: Yeah. I think there was no… ESS: Right. JEN: I think there was no distinction between audience and… ESS: Yeah. JEN: So here’s what made me think about this, right. It’s been May Day [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day] this weekend that’s just gone. And I obviously went to Clun Green Man Festival [https://www.clungreenman.org/]. ESS: Obviously. JEN: And, um… and it was lovely, and on the bridge they do a battle between the Green Man [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Man] and the Ice Queen, and… everybody can stand and watch, or, you know, come and go as they please. Some people dressed up, some people didn’t, and that was fine. Um… there are Morris Dancing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_dance] teams that do dances, and there was a hula hoop woman who was amazing with hula hoops [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_hoop]. For some reason. Um… [laughs] I don’t know what that has to do with May, but… ESS: Cycle of life, I suppose? JEN: … it was very entertaining. ESS: Wheel of the Year [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_the_Year]? Get in the middle of it? JEN: Huh? ESS: Wheel of the Year? JEN: Yeah, maybe. ESS: Just swing it around your hips? JEN: Yeah. And there was a fire man who did impressive things with fire. Anyway. It was very lovely. And there was a good MC [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_ceremonies] who stood on the bridge and made sure everybody knew what was going on. And… er, there were some warriors on either side, for the… for the Green Man and the Ice Queen, and they did battle, and a woman stood next to me said, “They never used to do this. It used to be a battle of words. And then they added this bit in.” And I was like, “Well, they probably added this bit in because, you know, people who do reenactment [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_reenactment] enjoy the battle thing”. Anyway. Um, it made me think that… this kind of festival… like, I could just get in touch with them, I’m sure, and say I want to be part of the thing next year, in the same way that I can get in touch with the local amateur dramatic society and say I want to be part of the group, and there’s no auditions, and you can just go and play a part if you want to. And it made me think: what happened? What happened that we… that we regard this differently. When did that happen? Why did that happen? And the answer, of course, is… ESS: Shakespeare. [laughs] JEN: The answer, of course, is Shakespeare, which you are now going to explain. Go for it. ESS: [laughing] What was your answer going to be? JEN: Well, mainly, you know… the absorption of religious practice into… into standard practice. So, we take away the community… participatory… stuff, because that’s not controlled, and we try and control it. We move from the multiple choral voice to the one voice, the single authorial voice… ESS: Yeah. JEN: … and so on. I want to preface this with: I’m a writer, and it’s going to sound like I’m against everything that theatre stands for. And… and that may be true [laughs] but also, it may not. I don’t know. Anyway, tell us about Shakespeare. ESS: This is my little theory, um… which is… so, um, prior to… I say ‘Shakespeare’, what I mean is that era of public theatre being kind of invented as a professional and commercial arena. So pre- the late 1500s, er… as you’ve just pointed out, all sorts of different performances went on all over the place, and there were travelling troupes of actors, but there were also people performing kind of informally in the inns and taverns, and sharing stories, and all sorts of stuff like that went on. And then there’s a point where the theatre - capital T’s - like, the actual first building called The Theatre [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theatre] pops up, and then all the other theatres follow suit. So this one, and The Globe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globe_Theatre], and all of that - in London, really specifically - and um, and there’s suddenly this bunch of people who are making a living from writing, and acting in, and putting on plays in these commercial venues where people are paying to come and see them. And at this point, like the social structure is very much like… to be professional, there has to be a guild [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild]. See, it’s literally your profession. So you join a guild, and that means you’re a professional. You do your apprenticeship, you become a professional… bricklayer, glove maker, etc etc, and you join the guild, and that gives you status and prestige, and a kind of, um, supporting structure to your profession. But acting is still disreputable and not a profession. So all of the performers in the troupes that were putting on Shakespeare’s plays and Marlowe’s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Marlowe] plays, and all of, you know, Middleton [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Middleton] and Dekker [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dekker_(writer)] and all of those other folks that are writing, uh, they are all members of other guilds. So I think Shakespeare was a glove maker, maybe? His dad was definitely a glove maker, so I think he kind of followed suit in that. Um, and they all… they’re all members of different guilds, because they have to be professional to be respectable and have status in society. Um, and this is the point where they start having to frame theatre-making as a profession, and what that means is becoming exclusive. So for you to be a professional, other people have to be amateur. For you to be a professional, you have to make some criteria about who can or cannot be viewed as a professional actor or writer, so… which is the point where women start to get excluded. So… and here’s an interesting thing around that, is that I think many of us will have been told in school or on tours of The Globe, or other places that we get theatre history bestowed upon us, people will often say it was illegal for women to act, it was against the law for women to act, women were not allowed to act. Phrases like that. There’s never, ever, ever been a law discovered that banned women from acting. JEN: Huh. ESS: It wasn’t illegal for women to act, but they were… it was harder for them to be seen as professional. So there are female guild members from the medieval period onwards, but they get fewer and fewer as we move into this early modern period where men are starting to really professionalise. [noise from above in Ess’s studio] Sorry, that’s my studio friend that’s crashing around. That’s not that… or, or it’s the patriarchy collapsing. JEN: Yeah! ESS: Who knows? Um, so, yeah, basically, um, there were women performing, and there were women performing on the London public stages as well. So there’s a well documented case of a troupe of European actresses that come over and put on a play on a London stage. Mary Frith [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Frith], uh… who is a gender queer person, but assigned female at birth so understood as a woman at the time, um, declared herself a woman on the public stage of The Fortune in 1611. So, um… yeah, but it’s a kind of moment of essentially professionalising a thing that has been previously done as like an amateur thing, and therefore excluding people, so… and that’s also the kind of, the thread of that is that you go on to exclude more and more people… JEN: Yeah. ESS: … from the experience. JEN: Yeah. The more and more… the more and more training you do... I must stop picking out RADA, but the more and more RADA you do, the less and less… ESS: Yeah. JEN: … access there is. The um… My, um, my very awkward research found that, um… guilds, professional acting guilds, the Artists of Dionysus, happened in the fourth century BCE, and they were then paid and travelled between cities and enjoyed political protection, it says here. Of course, Thespis was doing it for the tyrant, who wanted his message put out there, I think. So either the tyrant got him to do it or didn’t, didn’t tell him not to, you know, because it’s useful when there’s one authorial voice. Um… that’s what it’s most useful for, politically. ESS: Yeah. Well, and that’s the other thing that kind of comes out of that Elizabethan Theatre era is the idea of a single authorial voice, which is a weird… I think a weird, more recent misunderstanding of how it all worked. I don’t know quite when that idea… I suppose the… the sort of David Garrick, um, worship of Shakespeare, maybe, is the point where we start to really understand that, as a single authorial voice, and the idea of a playwright as someone who kind of sits alone in their garret and pens a work of lonely genius, right? But in the actual time of Shakespeare, um, it was much more collaborative than that. So… uh, and, um, various people whose names have fallen out of my head at this moment, but I’ll double check and send you after… [Stephen Purcell] have done some really interesting work [https://www.jstor.org/stable/26355161] on looking at how, basically, the audiences collaborated on those plays being shifted and changed, and like, the comedy, you know, they’d test out the comedy moments. There were improvised bits in the plays. There’s like instructions in some of the plays from that era that very clearly invite the… mainly the comedy actors, to sort of do a bit of business and try it out and see what sticks. JEN: I mean, this is Panto [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantomime], isn’t it? ESS: Yeah, totally. JEN: When the comedy act comes on and does their shtick. ESS: Yeah, and the audience’s reactions were part of it, you know. And there were moments where, like, um, if someone in the audience was found pickpocketing, they’d be hauled up on stage and tied to a post, and like, made a moment of, in the show. JEN: Oh wow. ESS: Um… and the audience was expected to react vocally. It was more like Jerry Springer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Springer] [laughs] I always argue, like The Taming of the Shrew [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_the_Shrew], for example, that sets up already the ‘play within the play’ like, I think, is written for a really noisy audience that are shouting back and disagreeing with the way that, uh, Catherine gets treated and all that kind of thing. JEN: Mm. ESS: Um, that’s my little soapbox that I’m… that I’m on. JEN: I’m here for it. ESS: Yeah, so, so we understand… JEN: But, but, but it’s interesting that that… that sets up rules of engagement immediately… ESS: Yeah, totally. JEN: Doesn’t it? Already. ESS: We understand a script now as an instruction manual. JEN: Yeah. ESS: The, the playwright writes the script, and you do your best to, uh… embody and personify the instructions in the script. The scripts that we’ve inherited from the 15th and 16th… fifteen and sixteen hundreds, are documentation. They’re an archive of a number of live performances that have already happened. JEN: Yeah. ESS: So they’re not an instruction manual. They’re an archive. JEN: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. ESS: Which is a very different relationship to… JEN: Yeah. ESS: … the audience reading and putting them on. JEN: But you can really see, can’t you, how things have grown into reducing and reducing and reducing engagement… ESS: Yes. JEN: And defining engagement really carefully. So, uh, just to add some extra bits of history that I’m almost certainly misrepresenting. Um, in Rome, professional actors were… had a low social status and they were often slaves, um, who could earn their freedom, potentially through that, or just earn their owner some money. So there were cases in which a theatre manager was just a guy who owned a bunch of slaves who were good at acting, and that was the work that they did. Um… so yeah, and then Thespis, that f****r. But of course, we go, we go from choral singing, communal ritual and Bacchanalian ritual and crazy ritual that anybody could participate in, and we narrow it down to scripts that are an archive of live performance that was captured, but still defining the space where the audience exists, and the space where the storytelling happens. ESS: Mm. JEN: So if you yank someone up on stage, it’s a clear pulling them through the fourth wall… ESS: Yeah. JEN: … in that way, um… and then defining and defining and defining it until we get to: there are certain words you could yell in panto and, you know… ESS: Yeah. JEN: … to the exclusion of… of everything else. ESS: Yeah. JEN: Okay. So this is codified practice. Um… which is… which is useful politically. Useful… and religion and politics obviously cross over a huge amount through history. So, useful for controlling the people. That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? We’re talking about increasingly using culture as a mechanism to control the people. So where do we think we’re at with that today? I mean, as a, as a writer, I used to think… um, I didn’t have a voice, I didn’t have anything I wanted to say, and that I should have a voice and make a statement…um… and, so for many years… also, for many years, I only wrote men. Isn’t that interesting? I would be like, “I don’t write women. Women don’t say anything. (Apparently.) I only write men because men get to say things.” Um… so what do we think about that today? Do we think that’s true, that the authorial voice feels like it needs to make statements about the world? And… ESS: Interesting. I think… uh, I’ve been thinking a lot about Marxism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism] this weekend. JEN: Okay. ESS: Um… and there’s something interesting about the way things get commercialised, I think, as a way of the structures sort of assimilating anything that might be a little bit dangerous or risky into itself. So you make it a product, and you sell it… JEN: Yep. ESS: … and then it kind of makes it safe. So I was thinking about um, uh… in the 20th century, improvised shows were illegal for a really long time, until sometime in the 60s, I think. Maybe it’s even later than that. The point where the Lord Chamberlain did not any longer censor plays. So you… if you wrote a play and you wanted to put it on, up until - I’m going to say sometime in the 60s - you had to send the script to the Lord Chamberlain [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Chamberlain%27s_plays], and the Lord Chamberlain would say, “Yes, I approve this” or “No, you can’t…” JEN: I’m sorry, sometime in the 1960s? ESS: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. JEN: You had to send your play to the Lord Chamberlain? ESS: Yeah. And… JEN: Even if you weren’t wearing breeches… ESS: Yeah. JEN: ... and a big ruff around your neck? ESS: Yeah yeah yeah. ‘Cause you might say something scurrilous. So this dates back to the 1600s when Middleton - I’m going to say… again, names, I’m not great with - uh, and someone else wrote a play called ‘The Chess Game’... ‘A Game At Chess [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_at_Chess]’... um, which caused such political uproar that, um, this kind of censorship model was, uh, very much more stringently applied. I think there had been a little bit of a Lord Chamberlain censorship thing before that, but the Game At Chess really upset the power structures. And so from then until - I will… please, someone, someone check the dates, but I’m pretty sure it’s mid 20th century [it’s actually 1968] - you had to send things to the Lord Chamberlain. So Keith Johnstone [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Johnstone], for example, who is the… JEN: Yeah. ESS: … kind of godfather of impro in this country, his early shows were, were basically kind of illegal. So he, he had to run them as teaching sessions, with kind of Tableau Vivant [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tableau_vivant] sort of moments in. So as long as he was there on the front row, kind of directing and air quotes “teaching” from the, from the side, he was allowed to invite people to come and be audiences of improvised shows. JEN: Wow. ESS: Because they were “teaching”, they weren’t theatre shows. Um, so it… basically you couldn’t, you couldn’t legally improvise a theatre show, or have, have improvised moments in your theatre shows, because you might say something politically dangerous. And then the point where that Lord Chamberlain thing is abandoned, um, and it becomes possible to improvise, um, is sort of… in a funny way, it kind of takes the edge off it for me, because now all of that stuff is very very commercial and, like, sellable, and there’s a sort of assimilatory aspect of it where it stops being a dangerous political tool, because now you can sell it, right? So, um… which isn’t to say that you can’t do brilliant, uh… JEN: dangerous political writing ESS: … dangerous political… anything. Like, you can still do it, but I think it’s an interesting thing to look at the history of that, of like… what we do now, playwrights now writing things where they sort of want it to be kind of shocking or revolutionary, but because it automatically… like, it has to be commercial. JEN: Yeah. ESS: You look at a model where you have to have money, you have to have funding, you have to be able to pay people, which I absolutely agree with. JEN: I do too. ESS: Please pay people! But it’s an, it’s an interesting tension, I think, around like, how, how risky, dangerous, edgy, thought provoking… any of this can be, because it’s within a commercial model, JEN: Well there’s… there’s also that really frustrating thing where theatres put calls out for work and they say, “We’re looking for something new. We’re really looking for the next new thing.” And what they mean is we’re looking for the next thing that makes us a lot of money, that is… that is so widely popular. I mean, wouldn’t it be really interesting if the next new thing was a play that only one person came to see and it changed their life? ESS: Yeah. JEN: And because of that, it changed their community’s life. Like, that’s the play I’d like to write. ESS: Yeah. JEN: Um… but it’s super interesting, isn’t it? That everything comes down to the fact that you have to keep the building open and, and the toilets going… ESS: Mm. JEN: And, and, you know, the fact that buildings are such a financial burden. I once spoke to an artistic director of a building whose name will… I won’t mention, or building I won’t mention, but they said, basically, on day one, you walk in and they say, you need to make us this much money this year. And that’s the, um… that’s the artistic… that’s the artistic director. So it’s not… there’s no… I don’t know where the ‘artistic’ sits in that… in that task. And also, you know, you have to, er, appease a disparate audience of people, because there are some people in any venue who will come and see a murder mystery, and there are some people who will come and see classic writing, and there are some people who will come and see a modern thing, and… you know, and you have to kind of balance your seasons, and I don’t know where ‘artistic’ lives in any of that. And then I don’t… you know, as a writer, I mean, I stopped considering these things ages ago because life is too short. But you, you’re constantly going, what, you know, what do I want to write? Not what do I want to write, but what can I write that there’s a market for? And what can I write that somebody might want to put on? And you’re, you’re constantly advised to think about cast size and what’s realistic, and… ESS: Yeah yeah. JEN: And all of that stuff is just not… there’s no art in… there’s no creativity in any of that. I mean, there is, in many ways, because when you’re given lots of constraints… like, uh, famously, Dr. Seuss [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss] wrote the books that, that he wrote because he was… he looked at the list of words that were permitted for books for children. And then he looked at all the books that use those words, and he was like, we can do much better than this. And then he wrote ‘Green Eggs and Ham’. [Actually, he wrote ‘The Cat In The Hat’ first.] So, you know, given constraints it is possible to be creative within them. But, but there’s a difference, isn’t there between, “Here are your constraints, please be creative” and “Here are the very narrow opportunities to get your work on and have this as a profession”. So we made it into a profession, and now we’ve made it the hardest f*****g profession in the world. So there’s that, and there’s also things like copyright. So I’m… I’ve done a lot of work with the Writers Guild [https://writersguild.org.uk/], and I’ve done a lot of defending copyright [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright], and the battle against AI and copyright, and all those things are hugely important, and yet I think we must defend copyright, because it’s the system we have, but it’s a terrible, terrible system, creatively, because it draws boundaries around the work, so everything becomes boundaried. And I really support people having a, a living wage, and I really support people making a profession, and I really support people studying their craft, and all of those things now also boundary the work. So you get the, the external, the negative as well. You get the flip side, which is that community theatre is frowned upon, and yet… or not frowned upon, but seen as somehow a less, less thing. ESS: Exactly. Which kind of brings us back to the… to the beginning, and the… this notion that maybe it’s more possible, I think, to be radical, life changing, world changing, and make meaningful work in an amdram [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_theatre] context. JEN: Yeah. ESS: And I think… I think… respect to amdram. JEN: Yeah. I mean, yeah. And maybe let’s, let’s move away from ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ as work… ESS: … as binaries. JEN: Yeah. I mean, it’s just… it, it, um… it devalues any… I’ve said to many musical theatre writers who’ve said to me, “How do I get my work on?” and what they mean is, “How do I get my work in the West End?” That’s literally what they mean. “How do I get my work on Broadway?” And I’ve said, “Work with schools, work with your local community, work with… do that work.” And somehow that is less valuable to them, and I… and I don’t know how we get around that, because this is access. This is where access and inclusivity lie, at the heart of this boundary stuff that we do. Um… so it’s not enough to have conversations about access and inclusivity where we talk about the, just the really obvious things. It’s… this is what it… for me, this is what it… it is about. It’s about being able to access creativity in a way that doesn’t tacitly shame you, because it’s got the word amateur on it, or doesn’t… It’s that tacit shaming again, isn’t it? ESS: Yeah, yeah. JEN: It’s everywhere! It bubbles under everything that we do in terms of culture. Um. Yeah. So I don’t know how we begin to address access and inclusivity when we have all these major boundary things happening, um… and where we start to have conversations about what Thespis did, that f****r… ESS: [laughs] JEN: … and how we… But it’s right, isn’t it? That… it’s right that, you know, you go and join the glove making guild, because this is what you do, and you want to do it, and you want to do it properly. And you want to have time to study what you’re doing and… and practice what you’re doing, and work with people, and… I want all of that. And the fact that we… that it’s got this hideous merger with capitalism… makes everything so very boundaried. And I don’t know where we begin as people who care about access, to try to address those things. [long pause] Have you got the answers to that? ESS: Not yet. [laughs] I’m working on it. JEN: Who could we talk to? I feel like… that… there’s lots of people who know a lot more than me about…um, the most obvious physical access challenges and neurodivergent and those things. There’s lots of people who know much more about that than me, and you and I should talk about audio describing at some point at length, because I would love that. But um… I would love to talk to somebody about this, about the social aspect of it, the tacit shaming, the… who would that be? And if anybody hears this and knows who that would be, they should let me know. ESS: I have some ideas, but I don’t want to drop them in it by saying. [laughs] JEN: Okay! Okay. Let me know. Um… there’s… the other thing I was thinking of is… there’s a wonderful book, which I’m really frustrated… I can’t find what box it’s in you. If you’re looking on the video, you can see I’m surrounded by boxes still, because we’ve just moved. Um, but there’s a book by a woman called Barbara Ehrenreich and the book is called ‘Dancing in the Streets: a History of Collective Joy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_in_the_Streets]’. And it talks about… uh, it’s a long time since I read it, so I’m probably going to misrepresent it, which I apologise for, but everybody should read it because it’s genius. And… she talks about how in the old days, the rites and the rituals and all that community-focused celebration was all of the ways that we did collective joy. And in medieval times, people didn’t work as many days because they had more holidays. And they had more holidays because they were asked to do a lot of work for not much return. So they got loads of holidays and stuff to make it feel like life wasn’t just desperate. You know? ESS: Well, I think Marx was… Marx was aiming for a situation where most people only worked sort of three days a week, and the rest of the time was free to make art. Basically, that was the… JEN: Yeah, yeah. ESS: That was the dream JEN: Yeah yeah. ESS: To just be creative and be human and have a nice time. JEN: And live. BOTH: Yeah. JEN: So the collective… the ways that we experience collective joy have diminished. Um, and really, from what I remember reading the book, going to football games is one of the few places where we sing and we are collectively… actually engaging with each other and connecting with each other, which we do not do in a theatre auditorium. We are collected, but we are not connected to each other at all. It is not a shared experience, and I don’t care what anyone says. I am not sharing with people. I have no idea how the other people feel. I know they laugh in the places where, technically, laughs have been generated by the… by the stuff on stage. I know we clap in places where, technically, claps have been generated by the stuff that’s happening on stage. I know that because I know how to craft those things, um, and it is crafted. Just because we’re all human, and we all clap at the same time and we all laugh at the same time, doesn’t mean I’m sharing an experience with those people. [Both laugh] Um… so yeah, collective… collective joy of the rites and rituals kind, of the collective… there was a mummers play which I missed, which I’m sad about. But, um, all of that sort of celebratory collective joy around storytelling seems to have disappeared, um, and that… and that is where the biggest access is now boundaried. You know, the biggest inclusivity, the biggest opportunities for people to engage when they want, how they want, to the extent that they can manage, and all of that stuff, we’ve just lost. We’ve lost all of that. And for me, access is, is that conversation as much as everything else. ESS: Yeah, I think it’s not lost, but I think it’s very marginalised and hidden. And I definitely can think of moments that I’ve experienced that… generally, they’re things like… I’ve run a writing workshop, or I’ve organised a series of workshops that other people have facilitated, and a bunch of people have come and done some writing, and then they’ve had an opportunity to share their writing, sometimes at an event, with a microphone, sometimes just in the room, and everyone who wants to have a go and share their stuff, shares their stuff and tells their story, and does their thing, and the collective joy around that, because everyone’s… had that moment of bravery, that like courage moment… JEN: Yeah. ESS: … and shared a thing. And it’s not that the thing gets judged, the thing is universally brilliant, and they’ve done really well. JEN: Yeah. ESS: And everyone says, “You did that really well”. JEN: Because it is a shared experience. ESS: Yeah. JEN: Everybody knows what… ESS: Yeah. JEN: … it’s nerve racking to do that, but you’ve put yourself into it, and… ESS: Yeah. And everyone’s had a moment of vulnerability, and a moment of validation, and then also, held someone else’s vulnerability and given them validation. And that… is definitely a place of joy. JEN: Okay, so maybe we’re talking about going back to, um, the original improv stuff, then, where everything is just framed as a workshop. [laughing] ESS: Yeah. Yeah yeah. We’re all… JEN: But I love that. I love that. I think the most interesting stuff in theatre happens in the rehearsal room, which the audience are boundaried away from. ESS: Yeah. JEN: It’s all of that exploratory… um, you know, discovery… This why The Copenhagen Interpretation [https://thecopenhageninterpretation.co.uk/] brings everybody together from the start. Because I don’t want to miss any of that stuff. ESS: Yeah. JEN: It’s all fascinating, and I don’t see why other people shouldn’t be allowed into it if they want to be. And when I have these conversations with people in theatre who… who are very ‘fourth-wall-y’ about theatre, um… they say, “It should be a safe space in rehearsals”. And a) I have many issues with the notion of the phrase ‘safe space’, because I don’t think any space is… can be guaranteed safe, and b)... ESS: Agree. JEN: Um… I think it’s… I… I’m not going to phrase this very well because I’ve never articulated it before, but I think it says something about us as… something social about us, that it is difficult to be vulnerable in the company of strangers. ESS: Mm. JEN: I think that… is a thing worth exploring… and acknowledging and regarding and supporting, in terms of… if we’re going to make theatre be inclusive and accessible again, if we’re going to make storytelling be accessible in that way, there have to be… there are going to be moments. You’re not sitting in the darkness surrounded by an invisible glass box. ESS: Mm. JEN: You are going to be vulnerable, not just in the same room as other people, but in the company of other people. ESS: Yeah. JEN: And that’s a different thing. And it is… yeah, it can be really difficult. And also it can hold you in a, in a way that is really beautiful, ESS: Yeah. I mean, I would argue… here’s my, my big hot take of this conversation… JEN: Tell me. ESS: ... that all of the s**t and strife and everything going on out there - America, Iran, etc - is a fundamental inability for any of those people to be vulnerable. JEN: Yeah. ESS: To admit to any kind of vulnerability. All of this dick waving that’s going on is basically about like, “I cannot be vulnerable in any way”. JEN: Yeah. ESS: “It is too scary and unthinkable…” JEN: Yep. ESS: “… to be even a tiny bit vulnerable.” JEN: Yeah. ESS: “So we’re just gonna front up to each other and lob big burny objects at each other.” JEN: Yeah. ESS: Because that’s how, that’s how terrifying vulnerability is. JEN: And it, it’s that binary distinction, isn’t it? It’s… that’s the feminine masculine as well: the feminine being weak and the masculine being strong, and the… all of that is all around vulnerability and shame… ESS: Yeah. JEN: … and all of that stuff, um… all of those binary systems… ESS: Yeah. JEN: … are about that, aren’t they? ESS: Yeah. [pause] JEN: So we just need to fix that. ESS: Okay, cool. [both laugh] Easy peasy. JEN: That was a nice chat. Thank you. ESS: That was a nice chat. Thank you very much. Links for things we mentioned Rites: Bacchannalia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacchanalia], Dionysian rites [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Dionysus], City Dionysia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysia#City_Dionysia] Folk traditions: Wheel of the Year [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_the_Year], Morris Dancing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_dance], Green Man [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Man], Clun Green Man Festival [https://www.clungreenman.org/], May Day [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day] Theatre venues: The Globe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globe_Theatre], The Theatre [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theatre] Playwrights: Aeschylus [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeschylus], Sophocles [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophocles], Thomas Dekker [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dekker_(writer)], Christopher Marlowe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Marlowe], Thomas Middleton [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Middleton] Staged works: Panto [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantomime], the Lord Chamberlain [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Chamberlain%27s_plays]’s plays Writers & specific works: Dr. Seuss [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss], The Cat In The Hat and other books; William Shakespeare [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare], The Taming of the Shrew [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_the_Shrew]; Middleton, A Game At Chess [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_at_Chess]; Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: a History of Collective Joy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_in_the_Streets] Performers: Thespis [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thespis]; Mary Frith [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Frith]; Jerry Springer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Springer]; Keith Johnstone [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Johnstone], Impro [https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/impro-9781350069053/]; RADA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Academy_of_Dramatic_Art] (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) Stephen Purcell, “Editing for Performance or Documenting Performance? Exploring the Relationship Between Early Modern Text and Clowning” [https://www.jstor.org/stable/26355161] Marxism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jenifertoksvig.substack.com [https://jenifertoksvig.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Ess & Jen chat

Recorded 20th April 2026 Ess Grange [https://substack.com/@slgrange] and Jen Toksvig [https://jenifertoksvig.substack.com/] have decided to try having an informal podcast-y chat on a semi-regular but no-pressure basis. We’ll meet up when we can, with no planned topics, just whatever feels most alive in us at the time, and we’ll talk until we are done talking. This first one is recorded over Zoom using Otter, so it’s grainy and sounds like eavesdropping on our phone conversation. We’re posting it anyway. Maybe next time we’ll use the good mics we actually both have. JEN: Shall we… shall we talk about something? ESS: Sure. JEN: [chuckles] I’m not sure… so there’s lots of like, recordings about access and stuff. Like, people who have podcasts, and they talk to people who make accessible theatre, and they talk about things that are important and that I’m sure… I’m sure that people go and find that stuff and listen to it, if they want to know how to make their work more accessible. Right? That’s a thing that people do, right? ESS: Yeah, all the information is out there in the world. JEN: Do we think people go and find out, or no? ESS: I think some people maybe genuinely do. I think some people probably tick a little box for work, to show that they’ve done the thing they’re supposed to have done. JEN: Okay. ESS: I think probably… my sense is, for a bunch of people, they go, “Oh yeah, that’s the answer to that. And now I know the answer. Job done.” And then they don’t necessarily keep up with it as a conversation, rather than some answers. JEN: Here’s my thought currently: that this is about what matters to us as theatre makers. So I say to people a lot… I said this on a… gathering I was at the other night… so my friend Christopher Morrison, who is amazing, does digital access and all kinds of theatre making around that. And is a writer and is a cool human, and has this thing called Prompt [https://substack.com/home/post/p-194268078], which is about narrative. It’s about challenging linear narrative, effectively, and ways that we can and should be more inclusive with storytelling, around using different forms of narrative. And it was a really interesting talk, as they all are. We’ve had a guy come and talk about kishotenketsu [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu] as a structure, and this one was a guy who came and talked about a book he’d written about how storytellers in contemporary media use… with dystopian and utopian stories, how they make excuses for, you know, “There’s this problem with the world, but then we’re just gonna ignore it, or we’re just gonna fix it, or we’re just gonna… we’re just gonna, you work within the system to address it. We’ll make legislation, and then it will go away!” It’s that kind of, that kind of storytelling. And I was talking, as I always do, about ‘Copenhagen [https://thecopenhageninterpretation.co.uk/]’, about the process. And I was saying, as I always do, the story is the last thing, not the least thing, but the last - because the first thing is to think about the people who are coming into the space, and what kind of world that wants to feel like, that experiential world, not the fictional one, but just like, what kind of world you’re inviting people to step into, like if you host a party, and what kind of world that feels like. And it made me think again about how most of the creative people I know, certainly people in theatre, will talk about work they’re really excited to make. They’ll talk about the story, or they’ll talk about the thing they’re responding to in the world with storytelling. And I feel bad thinking that that’s wrong to put that first. I don’t, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to put that first, but… but once you’re once you’re focusing on that, that’s what you’re focusing on. You know? Once you’re thinking about “I want to tell this story for this reason”... I’m part of a brilliant collective of playwrights who are writing something… female-identifying playwrights who are writing something in response to the Epstein files, and it… and the energy, and the passion, and the support, and all of that stuff is magical, wonderful. Not that we should need to have that kind of thing, but the fact that we do need to have it is… it’s amazing when it, when it does manifest, and people come together to respond to that stuff, and the focus is on that stuff and making that stuff happen, and finding a space to make that stuff happen. And I get it because, on the one hand, you’re… if I’m talking about just bringing people into a room, I’m talking about just bringing people into a room, and it doesn’t matter what story we’re telling at that stage, I’m just talking about, how can I make people be comfortable in the space? And on the other hand, the responding to the Epstein files is a really important thing. It’s the thing we’re doing. So I get very torn between… like, on the one hand, I care about The Broad Cloth [https://thebroadcloth.com/], and the story and the place, and the people, and the stuff - and on the other hand, I’m inviting people into a space, and that surely is my first responsibility. So I go back and forth about… people don’t look up stuff about access, and don’t listen to podcasts, and don’t go beyond just getting an answer, because they have a thing they passionately want to tell, and I’m not going to tell them they’re wrong to be passionate about that. Because that’s what being a creative artist is. Right? It’s about having a thing you want to comment on or observe. ESS: Somewhat, yes. I think for me, there’s like… an equal priority with that is the form in which it’s told. Like the story alone isn’t enough. It’s like… the process is also, and what is the most appropriate way… what processes can take, can lead us to the most appropriate way to tell that story. So there’s the form and the content, basically. And I get more excited about the form than I do about the content, most of the time. So for me, the form has to meet… they have to meet each other, the form and the content have to meet each other, and they will affect each other. And… yeah, I think that’s my starting point. And I know, like, a lot of the time… it sort of comes back to that Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction [https://www.ursulakleguin.com/the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction] tension of like, everyone is very programmed to the kind of Hero’s Journey [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey] arc, and the sort of single author idea that goes along with that. And so it’s all about, like, ‘pitch the story’. Like I was talking to a friend last week who does some writing for TV, and I was asking her about how that works, because of a project that I’m involved in. And she was telling me about, like, pitch decks and the sort of process of putting an idea in front, like a TV idea, in front of people that might commission it. And it’s all about, like, it’s all about trying to, like, sell people the story, the sort of elevator pitch of the story and the characters, and that that’s… you have to, like, hook people in, and all of the sort of terms around it have a sort of like… there’s a sort of hunting, a fishing kind of metaphor going on, right? That you have to, sort of like, you have to hook people in, and that the thing that you’re hooking them in to is this idea of the story, and this idea of, like, the lone genius author who’s like, got this story that’s like, so compelling… that, like, yeah, people are sort of unable to not… you can’t walk away from the story. JEN: It’s interesting, the word hook, because I write lyrics, obviously, and the hook of a song is the main thrust of the song. ESS: Yeah. JEN: But also, when I do fairytale gathering, and I talk about that, I talk about… there are barbs inside us, and bits of Velcro. ESS: Yeah. JEN: So I have always said that… I think stories are just out there in the ether, and we are conduits through which they pass on their way around the world ESS: Yeah. JEN: And when they pass through us, only certain bits of them catch on the barbs and the hooks and the bits of Velcro that are inside us, from our lived experiences. Stuff that gets jagged, gets made jagged from living… and then those bits of those stories tear off inside us and stay. As evidenced by the time, I asked somebody, what’s your favourite fairytale? And they said, “The Three Bears”. And I said, “That’s brilliant. What’s your favourite moment in the fairytale?” And they said, “When Mummy Bear makes Daddy Bear and Baby Bear lovely dinner, and they all sit down at the table and have lovely dinner together.” And I said, “That’s a lovely moment in the story. What about Goldilocks [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldilocks_and_the_Three_Bears]?” And they said, “Who?” Because it didn’t matter. Didn’t matter. Goldilocks hadn’t torn off on anything inside them. Goldilocks didn’t matter. Didn’t matter that it was porridge - typically a breakfast meal - just mattered that it was a nice dinner. That’s Mummy Bear making a nice dinner for Daddy Bear and Baby Bear. That’s all that mattered. So it’s interesting to talk about the hook of a story, in that I think there are commercial hooks, where we recognise… it’s like, you know, Rachel and I are writing a novel at the moment. And everything I see where I follow on Instagram, they talk about, “What genre is it? What other novels can you compare it to?” Because that’s all hooks. But it’s very different to what tears off inside us. Like the hook, the commercial hook of Goldilocks and the Three Bears was not what tore off inside that person, because it’s not clean hooks that we have. We don’t have commercial hooks inside us. We have barbs and rough, jagged bits from living, you know. It’s different. ESS: But I think there’s also… I suppose, for me, the feeding is less… hooks and barbs, and more, like, sedimentary… like there’s a sort of rainfall of information that circulates and filters through, and it leaves… there’s some mineral deposits that come out as it passes through, but it also leaves something… but there’s like a mutual exchange, right? So when I retell the story, it will have changed a little bit. I’ll be emphasising slightly different things, and there’s like a little bit of alchemy that happens as it’s on its way through, right? JEN: [lighthearted] Oh, I’ve been wrong about that all this time. ESS: But it’s not that any… it’s not that either of those is right or wrong. JEN: No, I know. ESS: It’s sort of different. And maybe some stories are more like hooky, barby things, and some stories are more like percolations over… possibly years, before you go, “Oh, that’s interesting”. And something else that just drifted through my head and I can’t remember what it was. But anyway… stories. Stories work on us, we work on them. JEN: Yeah, that’s true. That’s very true. So… so to circle back to access, I feel like you’re absolutely right. Like, every… every musical theatre mentor I’ve ever had has said, at some point, the words, “Why does it have to be a musical?” And it’s… that, for me, goes along with phrases like ‘When the character can no longer speak, they sing’. These are all things that can be said to be true of traditional American-book-musical-two-act… you know, the very traditional Broadway form. And these are things I’ve heard Sondheim say, I’ve heard Steven Schwartz say, you know, everybody say in an interview. And I found it frustrating, because it can’t be template in that way. I don’t want it to be template in that way. Either these are truths, and I want to understand why they are truths more than anything else, or… or this is a template for a standard form, and I am less interested in that. But why does it have to be… ‘why does it have to be a certain form’ for me is more about the… the inviting people in, I think. Because everything in fourth wall [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_wall] theatre is fourth wall theatre. Everything is the same form. It doesn’t matter whether it sings or not. It doesn’t matter whether it’s tap dancing or what it is, we get to engage in it in the same way. Whereas things like an art gallery, you can… you, you have a choice. You might be wandering around looking at things, and everybody’s wandering around looking at things, but you can also be sitting thinking, and you… you know, there’s a freedom of engagement there, in a museum or an art gallery, and even in a library, where you can browse books. And you know, there’s a freedom of engagement on the internet, which there isn’t in theatre, which there isn’t in movies. Unless you’re watching it at home on your telly. But even then, the only freedom of engagement, really, is you can hit pause and go and make a cup of tea. So I think my interest is in… is in engagement, but we don’t… if you’re a theatre maker, your engagement is sort of set. It’s a set thing. You know that people are going to come and sit in a seat and watch. And the only kind of choice you make is, “Do I want to make… am I an immersive theatre maker?” - is the question, isn’t it? It’s not like, “Do I want this to be immersive?” It’s, “Am I an immersive theatre maker?” Otherwise, the only time you’re asking that is kind of, “Do we break the fourth wall at this point in the show?” ESS: Yeah. JEN: That’s it. But the fourth wall is still very much intact, because you’re talking about breaking it, so… ESS: Yeah. JEN: So that… I guess my question is: in order for people to take more interest in inclusivity, not just accessibility, but inclusivity… because that’s what it is, isn’t it? If it’s not accessible to somebody, that they’re not included. ESS: Yeah. JEN: And that’s just rude. [laughing] ESS: But it’s also there… I don’t… there’s so much underneath it, of like… so in that, in that case, you know, that question of like, “Oh, I’ve got… I’ve come upon this story that must be told. It has come upon me.” However that works. “I will make it a theatre show.” And it’s like, well… why that? Why a novel? Why a poem? Any of those things, right? And I think there’s something in the traditional theatre culture and that fourth-wall-y thing that is… is automatically… Let me just try and get this thought in the right order. Because, in our culture, theatre is a commercial exercise, and it is… very entangled with ideas of author as authority… JEN: Mmm. ESS: And… sort of personality? So, like, the big name in the cast, whatever… and a sort of idea of, like, people being physically, literally given a platform to make noise… JEN: Be celebrated. Celebrity. ESS: Yeah, and that means making noise and taking up space, and a bunch of other people pay to come and… and have that bestowed upon them. JEN: Yeah. ESS: So there’s, like, just a built in self-importance… monologue-iness… is, like… it’s a product. I have to be… like, if I’m the author, or the director, or maybe the star of the show, it’s like, “This is my product that I’m… this is what I’m selling, and I own it, and I… and I sell it to you”. It’s like, very transactional, kind of one-directional. JEN: So this is what I’m talking about, it’s like, “I’ve trained in this.” It’s that whole thing of, when I talk about ‘Copenhagen’ to, you know, actors who’ve spent their lives training and working in fine establishments, do you know what I mean? And it sounds like I’m dismissing all of that work and all of that… ESS: Yeah. JEN: But I’m not. At all. ESS: But it is… I think it is a real battle to make that model inclusive because, by its nature, it’s exclusive. It’s like everything about it, you know, like, oh, ‘exclusive backstage tour’ for example, like… things that you sort of hear… like the extras that you get sold. “Have the box: it’s an exclusive space, with the little private, fancy room” and maybe you’ll get to meet the star of the show in an exclusive context, right? So the whole thing is, like… you’ve… “I have created this special experience that you have all paid money to come and be exclusively a part of”. JEN: Yeah. And it’s been optimised for the best… you pay more for the best seat, where the best sound is, you know, where everything’s been optimised. ESS: Yeah. So, because the whole sales package of it, and the principles behind it are, just by their absolute nature, exclusive, it’s… like, I think bringing genuine access and inclusion into that is… it’s kind of impossible. You have to, you have to do what you’re proposing, which is completely dismantle that whole idea of, like, a story being told by a kind of single author, and the director’s vision, which is in real terms, usually directed from the most expensive seats in the house, right? So, all of the, like, you know, the sound design, the set design, is very often constructed for… JEN: Yeah. ESS: Even everyone in the theatre, it doesn’t even include everyone in the building, it includes the people in the… JEN: In the middle of the stalls. ESS: The people in the expensive seats, right? JEN: Yeah. ESS: So… yeah, it’s not an inclusive system. Which doesn’t mean that it makes… doesn’t mean… I’m not saying that everything it makes is rubbish, and I’m not saying that people are training… that people are wasting their time training, or that the people aren’t really good at what they’re doing. But I think if we… if we’re thinking about inclusion and access as being, like, alive within that process, I think that’s really hard. JEN: And it doesn’t dismiss or diminish any of that training. Like, I’ve trained as a writer, and I’m experienced as a writer, and I have written stuff for The Broad Cloth. I just haven’t scripted it. But it doesn’t mean I haven’t used all of my knowledge of theatre, all of my training, all of my… Like, I’m experienced in stage management. I’ve had experience as a designer. I’ve had experience as a choreographer. I’ve done all the bits, because I’m greedy and I just wanted to try everything. So I’ve tried all the bits, and everything I know about all of those things I use in creating things like The Copenhagen Interpretation. But what’s interesting to me is I don’t have to employ them. I use them responsively, depending on what happens in the process. So we might have a very fine actor in the room who’s done lots of classical training and has huge experience. And there might be a moment where all of that comes to the fore, because they are responding to what’s going on, and they have those tools, and they can use them. And that’s great… it’s just they use them responsively. And there might be times when they’re just sat in the room being who they are as a person… and, and having their lovely experience for themselves in that way. And it might be that somebody else who’s never trained as an actor is performing a character, and gives that actor, as a human, a lovely experience as an audience member. Do you know what I mean? And that’s… for me, that’s really beautiful. It might be that Judi Dench makes the tea, and that’s lovely… like, I just… do you know what I mean? Having… having all of us together, having a human experience, is, is for me, more relaxed, far nicer. Like, I don’t have to be anxious for anybody, for a start. We’re not having an experience that’s… that’s exciting purely because something might go wrong. Which, as far as I can work out with live fourth wall theatre, is the literal only thing that differs from movies. That’s a really unfair thing to say. I know that performances change every day, but really they’re set so they don’t change every day. So the exciting thing about live theatre is, if somebody f***s it up. ESS: I think the interesting thing about… like, even those… the ones where people are… people do have a sort of permission to play it different every night, to quote Mike Alfreds’ book [https://www.nickhernbooks.co.uk/different-every-night], is that a lot of the really exciting discoveries and stuff - the like, working out bit - happens in a rehearsal room. JEN: Where the audience doesn’t get to… ESS: It’s kind of like an exclusive space, and then it’s sort of bestowed upon the audience, who might tune in to the nuances that are going on that night, but they don’t know. Like, as an audio describer, obviously if I’m describing a show, I’ll see it like a handful of times, live and on video, as I write my script, and the shows where they do have that kind of permission to, like, play with blocking or physical reactions and stuff, are really hard to audio describe, because the audio description hasn’t met the theatre making process, in that it’s like a… it’s a process that demands people do the same thing every time they do the show. And… so, yeah, so the… it’s like an interesting little tension, in that when the show is more live, the access is harder. JEN: Yes. Absolutely. And that’s, that’s… but that’s true of ‘Copenhagen’. Like, people say to me, “But aren’t you gonna have access clashes?” And I’m like, “Yes, left, right and centre.” [laughing] ESS: But we’re going to be very honest about them, I think that’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s an invitation rather than a dictation. It’s like, yeah, here are some people who have different needs. Some of those needs are mutually at odds… JEN: Yeah. ESS: But we’re all just gonna… that’s part of the conversation that we’re having. JEN: Because we’re all in it together, so we’re all going to make it as good as we possibly can for each other, collectively, and that’s the goal. And if it really doesn’t work, then… you know, and it might really not work sometimes, and that’s just a thing that happens in life. ESS: Also, you know, in that way of, like, telling the story multiple times, or from multiple perspectives, having the ability to go back and repeat. It’s like, okay, we’re going to tell this story, and we’re going to really prioritise people who are deaf or hard of hearing. JEN: Yep. ESS: Now we’re going to go back and tell that story again, and this time, we’re going to prioritise people who are visually impaired and blind. JEN: Yeah. Yeah. ESS: And it will be… different each time. So we won’t have the same experience, we can’t have the same experience. JEN: Why would we want to? ESS: And… sensorially, our experiences are not the same, so… but that’s fine. Because it’s still, it’s still holding that… it’s holding the story. And we’ll probably all learn a different thing about the story by doing it again with a different set of needs as a priority. And that is really exciting. JEN: Yeah. ESS: It’s all filtered through a different bit of rock, or it will get hooked on a different bit of person. JEN: Mm. Good. That was a nice chat. ESS: That was a nice chat. JEN: Thanks. Links for things we mentioned Christopher Morrison, PROMPT: Narrative Resistance [https://substack.com/home/post/p-194268078] Kishotenketsu [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu] Henry Lien, “Spring Summer Asteroid Bird: the Art of Eastern Storytelling” [https://henrylien.com/spring-summer-asteroid-bird/] Eugene Nulman, “How Popular Culture Destroys our Political Imagination” [https://www.routledge.com/How-Popular-Culture-Destroys-Our-Political-Imagination-Capitalism-and-Its-Alternatives-in-Film-and-Television/Nulman/p/book/9781032847702] Jenifer Toksvig, The Copenhagen Interpretation [https://thecopenhageninterpretation.co.uk/] The Broad Cloth [https://thebroadcloth.com/] Ursula K le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” [https://www.ursulakleguin.com/the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction] Joseph Campbell, “The Hero’s Journey” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey] Goldilocks and the Three Bears [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldilocks_and_the_Three_Bears] Fourth wall theatre [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_wall] Mike Alfreds, “Different Every Night: Freeing the Actor [https://www.nickhernbooks.co.uk/different-every-night]” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jenifertoksvig.substack.com [https://jenifertoksvig.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]