Celebrating Somerset's creative & cultural practitoners - Angel Exit

This July we are highlighting South West based company Angel Exit who we are currently supporting through our creative commissions award. Now seems a great time to talk to this established theatre company as August approaches and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the worlds biggest arts festival, is upon us. Many Somerset artists will be heading to the Fringe this summer including Angel Exit Theatre.

Angel Exit Theatre is under the artistic direction of Tamsin Fessey and Lynne Forbes. I met with them at Westlands and asked them about the history of their work. “We make all sorts of theatre. It used to be easier to describe the work we did but now we have diversified to include work that tours to libraries and other non-theatre spaces as well as work which tours to small and mid scale venues. We make work for adults but also for families, we create commissions for events and festivals, in particular we have done quite a bit of science engagement work. We create immersive installations which are more of an experience than a show. I would say that our primary work is still creating visual, physical theatre influenced by a Lecoq training which encompasses mask, puppetry, clown, Bouffon and ensemble work.”

At the moment they are touring three shows; toooB, a show for babies which has been touring since 2019 and played over 50 venues including Southbank Centre, Polka Theatre and The Egg, Book-Club for Super-Spies which is a library show for primary age children which sees them joining some madcap characters for a clue solving mission around the library, and Watts in a Home 2, which has been commissioned by the Women’s Engineering Society and looks at Women’s relationship with electricity and household gadgets through the ages. This show is touring Science festivals and Museums this summer. 

I asked them where across the South West they have been working recently “Tamsin lives near Wincanton and we devise most of our work in Somerset or at The Lighthouse in Poole where we are associate artists but now we are developing a relationship with the Octagon & Westlands and look forward to making more of our work there. We have toured work to venues, libraries and schools across Somerset and Tamsin works regularly with Make The Sunshine, running workshops and directing in schools in Shepton Mallet, and they have promoted performances of our work in the area."

Last month Angel Exit spent time in our studio rehearsing as part of their R&D (research & development) for their new show, Betty and the Yeti. We spoke a little about how they make their work in the rehearsal room, “It really depends on the show. Quite a few of our shows have been adaptations so then we’ll start by really interrogating the source material and finding out what we (and our audiences) find exciting, funny, moving and relevant about the source. Then usually we draw out characters and situations that we like and put them into improvisations. We are very collaborative and our ideal way of working is to have as many different voices in the room as possible, and people coming from different perspectives, e.g. a writer, a lighting designer, a puppet maker, as well as performers, researchers, students etc. We also love making mood boards on Pinterest for inspiration which we can keep going back to. We find visual stimuli really helpful.

During the development of this new show and as part of their Arts Council England funded project they have been working with local schools to develop the work. I asked them how this is going and what they have learnt during this period of development. “We visited Wincanton Primary School the day before spending time in the studio for our R&D and ran some workshops based on the book Betty and the Yeti which we are developing into a show. The time in the rehearsal room was useful to process some of their thoughts and to start to imagine the Yeti and Polar Bear characters and come up with some fun moments between Betty and these two characters. A lot of the work at the moment is in finding the fun, and how we stretch out certain elements of the story. The picture book is gorgeous and having a clear narrative structure already is really useful. Now we need to work on translating this to stage and also working out how we best tell the story with only two performers.”

Finally, our conversation turned to Edinburgh and the Festival. Every August the world’s largest festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, takes over the city of Edinburgh.  Angel Exit are taking up toooB which is being produced by The Pleasance. We spoke about the overall fringe experience, recounting some memories and spoke about what an Edinburgh audience might expect from the show, “We’re performing toooB at The Green which is part of the children’s area at The Pleasance. toooB is for Under 2s and their grown-ups. It’s a one- person show in which the performer is inside a collapsible tunnel for most of the performance. She wakes up and discovers the world around her and then she discovers and plays with the audience before gradually emerging from the tunnel and inviting the babies onto the stage to play in her world. It’s a wordless sensory show with an original soundtrack which sits somewhere between theatre, dance and puppetry.”

If you’re heading to the fringe, and have a small child, they perform twice every day at 10am and 11am – it’s going to be exhausting, but it’s exciting to have the opportunity to connect with industry and hopefully some international promoters. It’s also really hard to get a children’s show reviewed so we’re hoping to pick up some reviews. We’d love to connect with any other Somerset performers who might be traveling up and performing there this summer.” 

Edinburgh Fringe Festival Show - https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/tooob