“Fat Git Theatre” – Careers Interview

How was your company founded?

Fat Git Theatre was founded by Josh Roche and Rosie Spiegelhalter, along with the help of Meg Price back in 2011 when we were all leaving university. We made up one director and two producers, and we’d just worked together on a show that had made it into the National Student Drama Festival. We had a group of actors we liked working with, a clear sense of the theatre that turned us on, and some well-paid career options to disregard. So we made a Facebook page and a logo and grabbed some people together, and called it a company, about two years later it actually became one.

What does your company stand for or the type of theatre that it is most engaged with?

Fat Git Theatre discovers new approaches to new writing, and while doing so we tend to focus on ugliness and the grotesque as a theme. We started off as a devising company with an aesthetic trend, then we mutated into a company that was adapting more than it was devising, and then we got pulled in some new directions by the offer of working with some of Britain’s best young playwrights. It’s important sometimes not to pigeon hole yourself before anyone else has had a chance to – we didn’t jump to defining ourselves as this or that and we’ve remained the stronger for it.

How did what you learnt at uni support you in establishing a company and putting yourselves out there?

Two of the texts that we have produced into full pieces were originally found by company members at Uni (WINKY and THE NOSE). We are also hugely indebted to the Warwick Arts Centre, IATL (which was previously CAPITAL) and all the expertise of the people that surrounded us. I think the most important things we learnt were about the work itself – how to rehearse, how to judge if something works, how to be realistic when you feel that everything you create is gold dust, how to remain positive when you’re sure it’s all rubbish. Theatre is a mentally bruising industry that requires bloody-mindedness and sensitivity to be expressed in the same breath. You learn the basics of how to do that at University.

What have been you greatest successes or best moments?

Performing WINKY at Soho Theatre upstairs was a special moment, achieving four and five star reviews for our fourth show on the trot at the Edinburgh festival was another highlight this year. Aside from that it’s really just about those shows where you come away and you’re sure, everyone’s sure, company and audience, that you nailed it. The lift is all the better for the fact that it was experienced en-masse in a live moment. You may only have two or three nights like that in a run, but that’s the heart of the theatre drug. That’s the factor that makes people a bit crazy and convinces them to take on unemployment, debt and seven day weeks for the majority of their twenties, rather than plug into a graduate scheme at Faber.

What are or have been the most difficult moments for you all?

Funding funding funding. Applications you didn’t get. Applications you thought you got but didn’t. Applications you did get, but which took years off your life when you were writing them. Every obscure letter back from the Arts Council refusing to tell you why you didn’t get the money. Every project you see with money that you feel is less deserving than yours, which got rejected etc. etc. etc. It goes on and on and on. All we want to do as theatre makers is go to work – but the problem with the industry is you’ve got to raise thousands of pounds just to be able to do that. And then they wonder why we’re all a bunch of lefties.

What are your company up to at the moment?

We’re producing (i feel fine) a new play by Joe White which is on at the New Diorama, London in the first week of December and then at the Vault Festival in the New Year. We opened it last week at the Emerge festival here on campus. We are also in residency with IATL at Warwick for this term and term two – we’re running a series of workshops about collaborative drafting and environmental science. It’s a mad ambitious project, whose fruits will be available to be seen in the spring term. It’s great to be heading out on a big creative adventure like that, and not quite knowing where land is.

What are your future plans?

Just to do what we’ve got coming up, then rest, then start again.

What advice would you give to anyone who wants to break into the art industry, whether it be visual arts, theatre, dance, etc, but is too scared to do so?

You’ve got to be a fighter – not a backstabber or a cruel person, but you need to be willing to go at it hard. So I’d say do it because you know you can do it well, because you believe you can do it better than the others, because you think it’s important that other people see your work, because you’re driven by something bigger than vanity or showing off. The stakes should be that high. If they are, and if that’s true, then why on earth would you be scared?