Director Sally Cookson (left) reflects on a bold, two-year community theatre project bringing Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield to life with a cast of 104 local people, staged at Theatre Royal Bath in support of its new community studio, Venue 4. By Melissa Blease. Rehearsal images by Helena M Photography.
What do you get if you take Charles Dickens’ epic, semi-autobiographical 19th century blockbusterDavid Copperfield, adapt the story for retelling with a cast of 104 people, and stage it over five performances (including a grand Charity Gala fundraising for Theatre Royal Bath’s Venue 4, a new community studio theatre aiming to provide performance opportunities for local people) at one of the oldest, most beautiful working theatres in the country? We’ve yet to find out. But acclaimed, award-winning director Sally Cookson has been living with that very conundrum for the past 24+ months; if anybody has any idea how the ambitious community theatre initiative that is David Copperfield: A Life (Theatre Royal Bath, Friday 20-Sunday 22 February) is going to come together, it’s her.
“It’s been a massive undertaking for sure!” says Sally. “When I was invited to get on board, I didn’t even know exactly what we would be doing; all I knew was that I wanted to do it! I started my career setting up and working with a youth theatre. As I became an established freelance director, I missed working with young people, and I missed that sense of community. So I made a promise to myself, a long time ago, that I’d return to the idea of inviting anyone and everyone who wanted to come and play, and build an ensemble together. And here we are!” Here we are indeed, almost at curtain up – and getting here, for Sally and everybody involved, has been quite the journey.
That journey began back in January 2024. Sally was working in Japan when she got an email from Katherine Lazare, Head of Community Engagement at the Theatre Royal Bath, asking her if she was interested in staging a community project. “I didn’t have to think twice!” she recalls. “During the Covid crisis I was in on about fifty Zoom calls where the central discussion point was how can we support and rebuild communities when the pandemic was over, and I got very excited about that. And so it felt like the absolute right thing to do when I was invited to do this – a wonderful kind of synergy.”
At the heart of it all, I wanted to build an ensemble where every single person involved would be the stars of the show – that’s what it’s all about.”
And then, the hard work began… “Right from the off, I was really interested in owning the vulnerability that comes with ‘I don’t know how we’re going to do this, but we’re going to do it together’,” says Sally. “All I knew was that we were going to discover how to build this community bit by bit by being open, honest, brave, generous…and playful! Fortunately there’s a lot of help, experience and skill in the Theatre Royal Bath building; Katherine was involved with the TRB Engagement team when they made Ben Hur in 2010 [a similar community production that led to the establishment of the theatre’s Engage programme] and there’s a group of people who understand how to make community projects work. But I did a lot of research too, and relied on my instincts about how I wanted to shape the project. At the heart of it all, I wanted to build an ensemble where every single person involved would be the star of the show – that’s what it’s all about.”
Were you to talk to every one of the 104 actors (plus the massive volunteer team who each play integral roles in the production), each would have their own very different story to tell about why they got involved.
“They all had different reasons for committing to the project,” says Sally. “Some had just moved to Bath and wanted to get to know people, some wanted to build confidence, some wanted to do something they’ve never done before and put themselves out of their comfort zone. Others had seen the beautiful TRB building but never been in it! But it didn’t matter how old they were, it didn’t matter if they’d never even set foot inside a theatre before – in fact, that was the case for most of the people we reached out to. We have a group of Deaf participants, we have neuro-diverse people – the mixture brings another creative layer into the room. We’ve now all spent a year being together twice a week; we’ve got to know each other, and we’ve built a sense of trust and connection, and a way of learning how to really look out for each other in a very special way. And through the arc of storytelling, we’ve learned that we can make ourselves bigger, bolder, and more powerful – that’s been a radical insight and a discovery for me.”
And of course, there’s been the discovery of the story at the heart of the matter, adapted in this instance by writer Mike Akers.
“It’s all about the need for love in our lives,” says Sally. “It follows the journey of a young boy who, for the first seven years of his life, experienced absolute love from his mother and his housekeeper in an almost idyllic world. And then his world is completely turned upside down – his mother dies, he’s abused by a cruel stepfather, he’s sent off to a sadistic school and ends up being exploited as a child worker. He has to fight to survive and find a life with love and connection in it again, and the only reason he can do that is because of the foundations that he had. When we started to talk about this story with our participants, every single person responded really positively to the idea of love being an important start in life, and finding your way with your family and the people you want to spend your life with. It’s about finding community and establishing a family, whether biologically related or not. We found layers of the story that resonated with people in the room, whether aged eight or 82 – that’s the age range that we’re working with. We were all inspired by each other’s experiences and perspectives, and that’s very special indeed.”
The whole experience will no doubt change the lives of all the people involved in David Copperfield: A Life – including audiences. Will it impact on Sally’s work, going forward?
“Without a shadow of a doubt,” she says, emphatically. “Just being in a room of shared perspectives that are so very different has brought back the joy and importance of the arts, to me. And I’ve become fascinated by learning British Sign Language [BSL] – it’s a language that’s so useful in theatre because it’s a visual language that I’m really interested in incorporating into professional theatre. And I just love working with people who didn’t have theatre in their lives before this experience; this has been a way of moving beyond that point. Overall, our version of David Copperfield will be a unique theatrical experience, made by an extraordinary company with bravery, openness, generosity and a lot of love.”
In the words of Charles Dickens/David Copperfield himself, “New thoughts and hopes were whirling through my mind, and all the colours of my life were changing.”
That’s what you get if you take Charles Dickens’ epic, semi-autobiographical 19th century blockbuster David Copperfield, adapt the story to retell it with a cast of 104 people, and stage it over five performances at one of the oldest, most beautiful working theatres in the country.
David Copperfield: A life. 20-22 February at the Theatre Royal Bath.
For further information or to book tickets visit: theatreroyal.org.uk