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The full listings of the GIFT 2020 programme are still available to view under GIFT 2020 Archive

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If you are interested in finding out more about how GIFT looks when it takes place in Gateshead

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Lyn Gardner interviews Kate  ahead of the festival 

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Lyn Gardner interviews Kate  ahead of the festival 

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Preview piece about the journey towards moving the festival online for The Stage

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How Gateshead International Festival of Theatre has avoided cancellation

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Lyn Gardner speaks to Kate Craddock, the founder and director of Gateshead International Festival of Theatre, about how moving the festival online has opened up opportunities and given her ideas for its future

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GIFT 2020 reviewed in the online theatre publication Exeunt by Tracey Sinclair

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GIFT 2020 reviewed in the online theatre publication Exeunt by Tracey Sinclair

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Of all the admirable achievements we've seen in theatreland in lockdown, staging the entirety of GIFT (Gateshead International Festival of Theatre) online has to be one of the most impressive. Under the guiding hand of Festival Director Kate Craddock, GIFT 2020 - its tenth anniversary - was a rich confection of performances, workshops, discussions and online hangouts. From lo-fi 'filmed at home' Zoom artists' performances to using archived material, and from 6-minute radio plays to all-day installations, Twitter Q&As and virtual cocktail bars, GIFT crammed an awful lot into its Friday-Sunday runtime.

Now: full disclosure, I'm personally ambivalent about online theatre. While my feeds are full of people live-tweeting Frankenstein or raving about Polish Macbeth, I have mostly avoided watching anything. That's not to devalue what people are doing, which I recognise objectively is mostly A Very Good Thing - it's just that I have generally felt it isn't for me. It's not performance I miss; it's the ritual and social aspects of going to the theatre. It's being in a room full of people and watching the audience as much as the play, the atavistic response to communal reactions. It's also, if I'm honest, being forced to pay attention to something. I'm an inveterate multi-screener - it's rare that I watch anything at home without at least one other screen open - and being in a setting where that isn't allowed is good for me. How can that experience be replicated online? Is it foolish to even attempt it?

This is a question that Icelandic artist Gudrun Soley Sigurdardottir addresses in her piece Elision (from which comes that opening quote.) Broadcast live from her living room, she asks us to imagine we are together, but also raises the question not just of what is lost but also what is gained when we consume communal art separately. With no one to prompt us, she asks, do we know when to laugh? But with no one to see us - to judge us - do we more easily allow ourselves to cry?

In this meditation on national and personal identity, Sigurdardottir attempts to restage this communal experience through Zoom (I admit much of this was lost on me, since I couldn't get the right settings on my laptop - if the future of theatre criticism requires any form of technical competence, I'm screwed). In doing so - moving from the physical proximity of sitting next to someone in an audience to a digital invitation into our fellow watchers' homes - she transforms the piece from its original form into something different, both more distant and more intimate.

gobscure international's ships-ov-fool has a similar set up,albeit with even more audience involvement (the final segment of the broadcast is a Zoom chat with the audience). Its Newcastle-based writer/performer uses everything from poetry to puppets to explore modern attitudes to mental health and historical depictions of madness, inspired by Hieronymus Bosch.

As well as shows that repaid focused attention, GIFT offered much for those who have found the current crisis a drain on concentration. Greg Wohead's Crack of Dawn is a durational piece featuring ongoing discussions between Wohead, Amelia Stubberfield, Tim Bromage, and Catriona James. Stemming from a conversation between Wohead and his partner and an Amish couple in rural Illinois, this sunrise-to-sunset piece allows people to drop in and drop out throughout the day, giving it a slow-burn, meditative quality.

On the other end of the scale, The North Sea: A (radio) play in three pints offers three bite-sized pieces of drama, delivered one a day over the festival. A collaboration between Norwegian writer Nick Hegreberg and local North East creatives, this sharply written piece is performed by Brian Lonsdale and Karen Traynor, and directed by Northern Stage Associate Director Mark Calvert (with sound design by Nick John Williams).

My personal highlights of the festival were two very different productions, both of which pleasingly challenged my own ingrained beliefs about online art and my enjoyment of it.

It Don't Worry Me was a collaboration between Catalan company Atresbandes and Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas. Streaming a previously filmed performance, this slyly funny interrogation of art, politics and criticism was a meta delight where both performers and audience become commentators and commented-on. Witty and unexpected, it's a show that works perfectly online, where the discomfort of watching an (initially) empty stage is magnified, so used are we to seeing busyness on our screens.

In terms of unexpected pleasures, though, the most surprising for me was Oliver Zahn's In Praise of Forgetting: Part 2. Watching someone basically type stuff onscreen for an hour isn't the most convincing of sales pitches, but from such stripped back basics Zahn creates something that feels truly special.

Although a sequel to a previous stage piece, this is a standalone work in which Zahn examines the concept of social forgetting. Using little more than onscreen text boxes and an old recording of a folk song by post-WWII German refugees, Zahn crafts a compelling and thought-provoking piece that tackles everything from national identity to personal history to social and political policy, and considers how both the preservation of memories and the processes of forgetting are affected by digital technology. If the internet remembers everything, what happens when some things are best forgotten? Can wounds ever heal if the digital world renders them eternally fresh?

With such an abundant programme (offered on a pay-what-you-feel basis), it's inevitable that I missed some gems. Tania El Khoury and Basel Zaraa's As Far As Isolation Goes, Jamal Gerald's Instagram performance Idol, Action Hero's RadiOh Europa and Sophie Woolley's Augmented all stood out on the line-up, but I didn't manage to see them. But perhaps a bit of FOMO is the sign of a good festival - and evidence of GIFT's success.
GIFT Festival was streamed online from 1-3rd May 2020. More info here.

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Of all the admirable achievements we've seen in theatreland in lockdown, staging the entirety of GIFT (Gateshead International Festival of Theatre) online has to be one of the most impressive. Under the guiding hand of Festival Director Kate Craddock, GIFT 2020 - its tenth anniversary - was a rich confection of performances, workshops, discussions and online hangouts.

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GIFT 2011 - GIFT 2014 long and short videos on Vimeo

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Join the web's most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD with no ads.

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GIFT 2020 reviewed by Kate Wyver in The Guardian

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GIFT 2020 reviewed by Kate Wyver in The Guardian

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"I hope you're all still there," says a muffled voice. From under a towel and behind a screen, Icelandic artist Gudrun Soley Sigurdardottir presents her show Elision, a contemplation of heat, change and togetherness. At the start of the show, which her audience are live-streaming from home, she considers what it means to watch a piece of theatre with others compared with watching alone. Community is an idea returned to in much of the work over the weekend at Gateshead international festival of theatre. Instead of being cancelled, the festival has been speedily but sturdily reimagined on a digital platform. Sigurdardottir peeks down the live feed: "Maybe we are together in some way."

Making a theatre festival work solely online requires a heavy dose of trust, ingenuity and imagination. Impressively, all of the artists originally commissioned are still involved in GIFT, offering a variety of adapted, pre-recorded and deliciously low-fi experimental work.

One of the highlights is It Don't Worry Me. Recorded in January in Barcelona, this is a gloriously silly collaboration between performance duo Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas, and the Catalan theatre company Atresbandes. In a ridiculous search for meaning in art, Lesca and Atresbandes's Albert Pérez Hidalgo circle each other while offering deadly-serious third-person commentary on microphones. With glee, bare bums and brilliant cameos from their fellow theatre-makers, the pair simultaneously unpick and mock how theatre is made and analysed. The mixture of playfulness and seriousness - which recently earned Lesca and Voutsas the Forced Entertainment a ward - makes you ache to be in the room with them all.

Elsewhere on Zoom, a quieter performance takes place. As Far as Isolation Goes is a short one-on-one piece exploring refugees and isolation by Basel Zaraa and Tania El Khoury. In their original show, an audience member had stick figures drawn on their arm while being told a story. In this version we do the drawing ourselves as Zaraa guides us. Snippets of story and song from refugees in detention centres resonate particularly loudly but the performance, now lacking touch, loses an element of sorely desired intimacy. I can't help feeling that the original show would stick to my skin for longer.

In Augmented, another recorded production, Sophie Woolley tells of her journey to becoming a "deaf cyborg" with a cochlear implant. The solo piece finds its feet by navigating the line of understanding between Woolley's hearing and deaf loved ones. It's a fascinating insight into communication and expectation, and makes you pay more attention to the noises of the everyday.

Festival director Kate Craddock originally set up GIFT to bring a wider variety of performances to the north-east. By creatively adapting this year's festival to work online, she has opened its doors to a far wider audience. Alongside the shows, the programme also includes post-show cocktail parties and Twitter Q&As. Every inch of it is reaching for a sense of togetherness.

"I'm really enjoying the feeling of being next to other people," Voutsas says during It Don't Worry Me, "and feeling like we're laughing together, we're sharing something." GIFT is a heartening study and a solid blueprint for transitioning to digital in this strange and scary limbo. Until we can sit next to each other again, it is a pleasure to share stories in this virtual audience.
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Gateshead international festival of theatre - a virtual, virtuoso delight

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"I hope you're all still there," says a muffled voice. From under a towel and behind a screen, Icelandic artist Gudrun Soley Sigurdardottir presents her show Elision, a contemplation of heat, change and togetherness. At the start of the show, which her audience are live-streaming from home, she considers what it means to watch a piece of theatre with others compared with watching alone.

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The Defamation of Cicely Lee - Zoom Playreading

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The Defamation of Cicely Lee - Zoom Playreading

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You can see the American Shakespeare Center's Zoom Playreading of the play here:
https://vimeo.com/425611189 (this is live until Friday 26th June, using the password Whipday01)

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I was inspired by my work on 'The Keep the Widow Waking' projectproject, where we staged voices from early modern trial accounts, 'verbatim'

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I was also inspired by my NUHRI-funded project 'Creative Responses to Early Modern Witch Trials', which explored how to bring to life the voices of witches and their victims - The Defamation of Cicely Lee isn't about witchcraft, but it is about women on trial.

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In the 1613 pamphlet Witches Apprehended, Examined and Executed, a servant gossips about a local woman he believes to be a witch. As he speaks, he is struck by a beetle on the breast, and falls into a magical sickness. That night, he is visited by the witch's daughter:

[H]e being in his distraction both of body and mind, yet in bed and awake, espied Mary Sutton, (the daughter) in a Moonshine night come in at a window in her accustomed and personal habit, and shape, with her knitting work in her hands, and sitting down at his beds feet, sometimes working, and knitting with her needles, and sometimes gazing and staring him in the face, as his grief was thereby redoubled and increased. Not long after she drew nearer unto him, and sat by his bedside (yet all this while he had neither power to stir or speak) and told him if he would consent she should come to bed to him, he should be restored to his former health and prosperity...

The servant is given divine assistance, and is able to refuse Mary's offer. The next day, his master brings her by force to the servant's bedside, and the servant lets her blood, and finds himself cured.

In another pamphlet, A Most Wicked Work of a Wretched Witch (1592), a man sees a hare that his dog will not chase. The hare leads him to the house of Mother Atkin, whom he believes to be a witch. He tells her so, and the next day, when eating his lunch in a barn, he sees a monstrous black cat cavorting in hay, and hears a spirit calling him to leave his food and come outside. Carrying his apple pie with him, the man steps outside the barn, and is dragged through bush and briar to a place of hellish heat and darkness. He is thirsty, and looks about for an alehouse where he can spend the penny in his pocket, but cannot find one. When he is magically returned from this strange land, his tongue is tied and he cannot speak, until a parson unties it, and then he cries out, 'Mother Atkin'.

In another, A True and Just Recorde, of the Information, Examination and Confession of all the Witches, taken at S. Oses (1582), two young children testify against their mothers. One tells how his mother feeds household pets - cats, a lamb, and a toad - with bread and milk by day, and blood from her body at night. Another confesses her mother keeps miniature horses in a 'little low earthen pot' in her chamber - but has forbidden her to tell.

Stories like these seem to belong to the world of the nightmare. They follow a kind of dream logic, in which the tastes and textures of the everyday - apple pie, knitting needles, alehouses, pots, and pets - are transformed into the realm of the uncanny. They are obsessed with the power of naming the witch (and the nature of retaliation it can provoke), and with the magical potential of the witch's blood, to feed a demonic familiar - or to break a spell.

In a workshop at Northern Stage on 31 May, I worked with a director (Asia Osborne) and four actors (Beth Eyre, Joe Eyre, Maryam Grace, and Hilary Tones) to explore the strangeness - and the familiarity - of these texts, the ways that they represent uncanny, dreamlike versions of the everyday. We wanted to experiment with a range of theatrical approaches to these witchcrafts narratives: we used 'verbatim theatre' to stage witch trials - speaking in the voices of the 'witches' and their 'victims' and accusers - and physical theatre to enact victim's accounts in cheap print, with the actors embodying the eerie animals, subversive women, and bewildered men that populate these texts.

We also explored the ways in which the dream logic of these accounts resonates with that of contemporary nightmares, by staging elements of the dreams of two of the workshop participants: a dream of escaping from persecution through animal transformation; and an account of sleep paralysis. We then incorporated aspects of these dreams into our performances of witchcraft.

At the opening of the workshop, I asked participants to take an object from a pile of theatrical props (or a personal object of their own), and hide it somewhere in the theatre space, riffing on the hidden objects that have been discovered near windows, doorways, and fireplaces of early modern homes, concealed to confer a kind of magical protection. I also asked participants to join me in reciting the spell recited before King James by the condemned witch Geillis Duncane at the North Berwick witch trials (as reported in the 1592 pamphlet news pamphlet Newes from Scotland):

Commer go ye before, commer go ye
If ye will not go before, commer let me.

In requesting workshop participants to engage in two forms of communal counter-magic, I wanted us to inhabit two mind-sets simultaneously - the sceptical approach we take today, through which witchcraft accounts are understood in terms of misogyny and communal fantasy, and the approaches of the original readers of these stories, who may have shared some of our scepticism (and that of writers like Reginald Scot) in relation to specific narratives, but who nonetheless existed in a world where uncanny events could be understood in relation to magical, demonic, and providential interference. Moving between these mind-sets enabled us to encounter the strangeness of these stories as at once past and contemporary, estranged and familiar.

This opening was followed by talks from my Newcastle colleagues: Kate de Rycker on her adaptation of Thomas Nashe's nightmare text Terrors of the Night; Ruth Connelly and Margaret Wilkinson on Margaret's verbatim play The Newcastle Witches and its roots in the Newcastle witch trials of 1650; Zoe Cooper on her perspective on the economic implications of working with historical texts as a female playwright; and Alison Atkinson-Phillips on the approach she brings to these texts as an oral and cultural historian. We were also joined by visiting speaker Lucy Munro (King's College London), who spoke about her edition of The Witch of Edmonton, its relationship with Henry Goodcole's pamphlet The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a Witch, Late of Edmonton (1621), and her own work on early modern verbatim theatre.

Situating these witchcraft narratives in relation to this range of disciplinary approaches was helpful in thinking about what questions to ask of these texts in performance. I've written about some of these texts, and how they relate to Shakespeare's undomestic witches in Macbeth, in my book Shakespeare's Domestic Tragedies, but I wanted to use this workshop to explore them from a different perspective: as performance texts that we can engage in close reading collaboratively through a theatrical event. I also wanted to explore the possibilities of early modern cheap print as a prompt to the creativity of contemporary directors and playwrights.

In staging the scenes, participants explored questions of uneasy laughter and its relationship with genre; of the danger of flattening the strangeness of these texts by attempting to create a single interpretation; of the desire to interpret that these texts invite; and to moments of dissonance between the wider cultural narratives with which these texts are engaging, and the particularities of each account (which often call into question the relationship between the fears and desires of the accusers, and the nature of the 'guilt' of the witch). We discussed these texts in relation to transgression - the women accused of witchcraft are doing the wrong things, at the wrong times, in the wrong places, crossing temporal and spatial boundaries - and as expressive (like the contemporary dreams we staged alongside them) of both cultural and personal anxieties.

This workshop has informed the way I close read these plays as an academic, and opened up new ways of imagining these texts in my work as a playwright. I'm currently working on a new play, Bonfire of Flowers, which is inspired by the true story of the Belvoir Castle witches, Joan, Margaret, and Philip Flower, as represented in a pamphlet - The Wonderfull Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower (1619) - and a ballad - Damnable Practises of three Lincolneshire Witches (1620). The accounts of these women's 'crimes' share many of the concerns of the texts explored in this workshop: they engage in a wide range of magical and non-magical transgressive behaviour, from cursing and seducing to nighttime walking and murderous magic. As I revise the play, I want to incorporate some of the uncanny strangeness explored in these workshop; I'm seeking to ventriloquise the voices of the accused women, even as I stage the nightmares of their accusers.

The London Shakespeare Centre presented a staged reading of Bonfire of Flowers on 17 July at the Anatomy Museum, King's College London. Both the workshop and the reading were supported by Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute and the Leverhulme Trust.

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Witches at Night: Creative Responses to Early Modern Witch Trials

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In the 1613 pamphlet Witches Apprehended, Examined and Executed, a servant gossips about a local woman he believes to be a witch. As he speaks, he is struck by a beetle on the breast, and falls into a magical sickness. That night, he is visited by the witch's daughter: [H]e being in his distraction both...

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Here are the first three scenes from my play The Defamation of Cicely Lee, which we'll be reading in the first seminar of the series!

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The Defamation of Cicely Lee by Emma Whipday - Opening Scenes

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I use this song throughout Cicely Lee to remind the audience of the Northumberland setting!

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Water of Tyne - Vicki Guillory & Adrian Nation

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Here's an interview with me and the Defamation of Cicely Lee director, Stephanie Holladay Earl, about our previous collaboration - a new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility for the American Shakespeare Center

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SENSE AND SENSIBILITY with Emma and Stephanie