THE CATHOLIC HERALD NOVEMBER 23, 2007

9

FEATURES

Staging the drama of faith

The members of Ten Ten Theatre are on a mission to produce great plays with a Catholic message. Anna Arco meets them at their latest performance

London’s Leicester Square is all bright lights and big city. Tourists, ticket hawkers and pigeons line its garishly lit promenades, while flashing lights proclaim the titles of lurid or funny West End shows and new must-see films. The mild October evening draws people out en masse, eager to divert themselves for a few hours. But in a withdrawn venue, hidden away from the gadding crowd, a play with an unusual message holds its West End debut and its closing night on the same evening. The French Church, as Notre Dame de France on Leicester Square is more commonly known, is packed on the evening of October 7. The performance tonight is Kolbe’s Giftby David Gooderson, a play based on the death of St Maximilian Kolbe at Auschwitz. The message is one of hope, suffering, sacrifice and God’s love. The actor playing Fr Kolbe looks uncannily like the photographs of the actual saint. For weeks this play has been touring London churches. On its last night Fr Kolbe gives his life for a fellow human being to a full house. This production is one of many put together by the grass-roots professional theatre company Ten Ten. Religion and theatre are no strangers to each other. This year has seen The Last Confessionand On Religion, to name only two of the plays with religious subjects staged in the West End. But the Ten Ten Theatre company, which claims to be the only professional theatre

company in Britain with an underlying Catholic ethos, has two objectives at heart: good theatre and a Christian message. These objectives are often at odds with each other, says Angela Ward, one of the young actors in the plays. Most new religious plays do not make good theatre, she argues, but she has been impressed by the quality of the plays Ten Ten set out to produce. Kolbe’s Giftis the second Ten Ten play she has acted in. Ten Ten, named after the chapter and verse in St John’s Gospel –“I am come that

Their productions are not amateur dramatics, and there are auditions for every play

they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly”–has been around since 2003, but Martin O’Brien, the company’s artistic director and founder, says that it has only really taken off in the last year. Ten Ten consists of a board of directors but doesn’t have a permanent stable of actors to rely on. At the moment O’Brien’s mother and sister do much of the administrative work. Schools are the mainstay of the company’s work. O’Brien’s early play Babies,which deals with teen pregnancy, has been put on in schools around the country since 2003. This year Ten Ten will be staging plays for

almost 20,000 young people around the country. The second most important venues are churches. Kolbe’s Giftand Pope John Paul II’s early play The Jeweller’s Shopare among those staged in churches. While the crew sets up the stage in the church before the performance, the youthful and energetic O’Brien explains the company’s beginnings and goals over coffee in Leicester Square. The professional actor and scriptwriter is its driving force. A neat, trim man in jeans and a white shirt, his grey hair belies his young face and eager blue eyes. Not only does he run the theatre company, he also writes scripts for the BBC One television drama Doctors and works on new plays for the project. “Ten Ten was a way for me to find a bridge between my professional work and the work I was doing in the Church,” he says. The Church has played a big part in his professional trajectory. Upon finishing school at St Chad’s in Runcorn, Cheshire, O’Brien came down to London to take up a part in the West End musical Blood Brothers. For the first few years he was parish-less, but began to go on the young adults pilgrimages to Lourdes. While pursuing acting he got involved in the Diocese of Westminster’s SPEC youth programme, directing plays with young people and going on retreats. It was here, he says, that he found his way to playwriting and scriptwriting, because he had to prepare plays for the youngsters to act for the SPEC events and festivals.

John Ioannou plays St Maximilian Kolbe in Ten Ten Theatre’s production of ‘Kolbe’s Gift’

“My writing was always born out of faith issues,” O’Brien says. “So it makes sense that I write these plays for Ten Ten which are challenging and about faith.” Despite O’Brien’s dynamic attitude and passion for his

project, it is not without its problems. Funding is difficult to come by but O’Brien is optimistic. At the moment, the costs of the plays are covered by the churches and schools where they are staged. If the company wants

to put on a play, it works out how many churches it will need to cover the costs of costumes, actors (who are paid less than their normal wage), stage crew, lights and, of course, the set. For Kolbe’s Gift Ten Ten worked out that

it would need 15 churches to stage the play. The churches pay for the performance to be staged in their venues and the onus is on them to muster the audiences for the shows. In theory, at least, they attempt to break even on charging for

tickets. O’Brien reckons that charging the punters even a small entry fee makes the audience turn up. Still, he dreams of getting more funding for the organisation. He already is working with partners such as Life and Cafod has commissioned a play on global warming. Ten Ten has applied for an Arts Council grant, but O’Brien thinks it unlikely that the company will get funding. Ten Ten productions are not supposed to be amateur dramatics, and O’Brien holds auditions for every play that is put on. Some of the actors are Catholic, others are not. But O’Brien insists that they need to feel comfortable with the underlying Catholic ethos. Some are very experienced, like John Ioannou, the actor playing Fr Kolbe, who was in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazarethand works with the British Shakespeare Company in the summers. Others take the opportunity Ten Ten offers to gain experience. Angela Ward, who plays Irena, a Polish girl who works for the Germans, met O’Brien at SPEC after she started a career in acting and came across 167 Hours, a play O’Brien had written for Oct06, a Catholic youth gathering in Birmingham last year. She liked the play and got the part. While she likes what she describes as the “Christian ethos” of the company and enjoys being involved, she does not feel that her decision to act in the Ten Ten plays was informed as much by her faith as it was by the quality of the plays themselves. In the next couple of months Ten Ten will be putting on Dead Man Walking in schools for the Sister Helen Prejean conference. O’Brien is working on a new play entitled Chased for the schools project. This will accompany Babies, which still tours the country. Meanwhile, back at the French Church, actors half in costume rush around with last-minute preparations, but the stage is set. Soon the audience will be transported to occupied Poland.

For further information, visit www.tententheatre.co.uk or tel: 0845 388 3162.

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