Trestle Theatre Company – Mask Theatre for a Modern World
Trestle Theatre Company set out to be a modern Commedia troupe. That is, we wanted to tour popular mask theatre. We’d use full masks and half masks and we’d tour with a Trestle stage, which we could put up in streets, theatres etc wherever we went. That was the plan.
It wasn’t long before we realised several flaws in our plan. Firstly, straight out of college, we were broke. We couldn’t afford to build a trestle stage, let alone the van required to tour it in.Secondly, we realised a fundamental truth – it rains quite a lot in the UK. But we pressed on regardless. We kept the name, Trestle,
and continued to write work, based on the full mask.
Our first production as TrestleTheatre was a short sketch called ‘Creche’. We spent several days sitting in a London creche, observing the antics of children, then went back into the rehearsal room to create the piece. Like all great drama, we had victim, oppressor, rescuer. And a big dangerous climbing frame. We performed the first night in a pub theatre and it really bombed. It just wasn’t funny. We tried to be too clever, to overlay adult themes onto the children’s play. It ended up being too arch and up itself.
We came in the next day and completely rewrote the piece, and presented it that night. Big laughs, great success. What was different? The second version we just let the masks do their thang. They made great entrances, they responded to props and people, they made decisions and acted upon them and bore the consequences. It was a template that was to underpin so much of our work. ‘Creche’ continued to be performed, along with other sketches, with different casts, for around 15 years, and it didn’t change from that second night. Perfection.
The next production was also a disaster, but had great masks. We adapted Chaucer’s “The Pardoners Tale”, and made the mistake of letting the piece be ‘directed’. John Wright, our lecturer at college took the helm – all theatre needs a director, right? – and tried to block the story in a traditional way.
This is no criticism of John, we all knew plays got blocked. But that’s with a script! We had no script, but a series of events that told the story. We were in unchartered territory. The result was a mangled piece of theatre that refused to fly, as the masks were working without motivation or thought process, just following orders. It was dull and irretrievable. We ditched the piece after one night, licked our wounds and learned the lessons and moved on.
Using the template of observation from ‘Creche’ we created ‘Hanging Around’, about unemployed youth on the streets, and ‘School Rules’, a comic observation of school kids on their lunchbreak. Bullies, victims, rescuers. And a teacher on stilts. We stepped back into the ‘Noisy Mime’ world with “Bigfoot’, a mime play following a King Kong narrative, which partnered ‘Hanging Around’. Bigfoot was fun but we’d clearly hit on something with the full masks. After 3 years, we got our first Arts Council Grant.
Trestle Theatre gets boxed but not fenced in.
It’s worth mentioning at this juncture, just as Trestle gets going, the mask design. British culture can be very compartmentalised. We’re put into boxes and labelled. At our conception, people looked at us and asked why we were doing Moving Picture Mime Show? There already existed a British Mime company using masks, so that box was full. It’s a bit like asking why Ballet Rambert were doing modern ballet when London Contemporary were doing it too. Crazy.
We responded by finding our own style of masks, not the white over-sized Larval masks inspired by the Swiss mask festival in Basle, but flesh-coloured and crash-helmet style. For these early pieces the masks were made of clay then covered in Cloth-mache and finished in a Plaster of Paris gesso and stage makeup.
By 1984 we had a series of successful tours under our belt with the ‘Hanging Around’ triptych, a proper administrator in Penny Mayes, and a van. What we didn’t have was a wage. We’d established ourselves as a touring mask company, played in Holland, Spain, Hong Kong and venues around the UK.
We’d worked out how to write funny, bitter-sweet sketches in full masks, tour them and not go mad. Time to move on. Time to move the genre on. Nobody, to our knowledge, had attempted to create a full-length mask play. This was to be our next challenge. It was also setting a precedent for the future of Trestle Theatre. Every production we undertook would have at its heart the desire to understand something new about the mask onstage. To push the style, to create new work that also learned something new about the genre.
As we entered the portentous year of 1984, Trestle went to the pub…..
The next instalment to follow…. in the meantime try these other articles…
Or try these links for some early history on Trestle Theatre.
Trestle Theatre Archive 1981-2000
Trestle Theatre Archive 2000-2010
(Toby’s last show with Trestle was “the Smallest Person” in 2004)
