PLANTING THE GLOBE

Now the Willow Globe is here it's hard to imagine the field it was planted in, in April 2006, without it.  The theatre nestles in a corner of a field behind our house, Penlanole; when we had the idea to plant a theatre we took advice as to the most welcoming habitat on the farm for such a willow structure. The willow would like a bit of shelter, we were told, and damp ground – easy to find with Rhayader's high rainfall making it statistically one of the wettest areas in the British Isles – and this field fell in a gentle slope from West to East towards a ditching brook, so it met these requirements, and also our own considerations that for an open air theatre it would be helpful if there could be a natural rake to the auditorium and the setting sun could light the stage of an evening. All good. But before going further, why plant? What was the rationale behind planting a theatre? Mad. Or not; this is after all Radnorshire and there's room for imagination and dreams.

Penlanole – spelt as Pen-llan-olau on the wall in Nantmel Church, where the tablet in memory of a former inhabitant Daniel Reid is hung – has been on record in the Powys Archives since in 1643 it changed hands as payment for a gambling debt.     Local historian Douglas Mytton considers it was here long before; that the Romans, and others, travelling North over the hills from Beulah, forded the Wye at the crossing below the Argoed Mill  and found at Penllanolau a welcoming flat patch, bathed in sunlight, for pitching their tents. At 625ft above sea level it would have always been safe from river flooding, and certainly it’s an old place - when we were growing up here Dad found a curious brown lump which he took to be an old crock lid, or even could it be a fossilised cowpat? He sent it to the University of Wales where experts pronounced it to be a crog-ball, a section of the earth's crust bubbled up under the water when all hereabouts was under an ancient pre-Silurian sea. So Penlanole has always had a magic of its own.

Perhaps before going further in the story of how the living willow theatre has come to be here  - willow, tree of dreams , ‘we are such stuff as dreams are made on’- its appropriate to give a brief background of how we, it's planters, got here. My parents came to Penlanole, nr Llandrindod Wells, Radnorshire in the 1950s. Dad, Major Francis Pulford R.A., had been a regular soldier, and he absolutely relished what he saw as the freedoms and companionship of farming. In those early days of mechanisation much was still done by hand, we had great gatherings at such events as harvesting, dipping, or shearing when everyone would foregather to help with the neighbours' stock. Mum, painting under her maiden name Elizabeth Stewart-Jones, was a professional artist who had used the endless travelling of army life as fuel for her sketchbook and countless portraits. Now, when time permitted, she painted local landscapes and  - able to catch a deft likeness very quickly  - many local portraits. Her much-loved picture of Tony Hawkins, MFH, hangs still in the Lion Royal in Rhayader.  My sister and I went off to university then based ourselves in London, returning always for holidays with our growing families.

Theatre was where the work was for me. I worked variously as actor, fixer, stage-manager, writer, researcher, workshop leader, director - and at every level: weekly rep, fixing for the Monteverdi Orchestra, acting Rosalind in open-air Shakespeare, assisting Dr Jonathan Miller, directing the W11 Children’s' Opera and becoming a staff director at the Royal Opera. It was during a stint working with Michael Bogdanov and the English Shakespeare Company that I fell in with Philip Bowen, an actor whose career had spanned playing the back end of a donkey in panto, seasons in Regent’s Park, and Hamlet at the Old Vic. He had spent years on the road, acting in theatres around the world with Michael Redgrave's Company 'Shakespeare's People' and then with companies working for the British Council. Together we decided to form our own company, Shakespeare Link.

The premise underpinning Shakespeare Link was simple. Its remit is to use drama, and particularly the works of Shakespeare, for the benefit of the community, in ways which are not necessarily limited to theatre performance or academic study. We believed, and still do, that Shakespeare is a behavioural resource second to none; that, writing over 400 years before Marx and Freud, his tools of analysis can’t be beaten; that access to his plays should be free and easy and exposure to them will be always helpful to all concerned. We became a Registered Charity and in the early days we were a sort of commando unit, always on the road to schools, colleges, prisons, working with specialist groups such as family therapists and often on performance/teaching tours abroad. We saw ourselves as client led, always trying to provide what might be required: a session using Shakespeare as a springboard for debate about gender, or leadership, or families at risk; a production celebrating the links between England and France for a Festival in the Lebanon. We met up with some deaf actors, and realised that they had no access at all to a cultural icon the rest of the world takes for granted, that Shakespeare has been translated into over 80 languages around the world, everyone knows Romeo and Juliet, yet there was no translation into Sign Language. Making our first film in BSL brought us back to Radnorshire.

Penlanole provided a wonderful location for the several films in the series that followed. Wonderfully diverse, with an orchard for Ariel to sing under the blossom, a turberry field for Caliban to hunt for firewood in, twisted woodland for Oberon to meet Titania, the sunny lawn in front of the house for Viola to visit Olivia, it offered backdrops for almost every scene. And it was around this time that we realised that it was time to come home. Dad had died in 1978, and having been on her own for years Mum now could do with a hand. We moved back to Penlanole, took back in hand  the 40 acres which had been under a grazier, Phil started his own organic small farming enterprise and Shakespeare Link began to operate from the spare bedroom. Coincidentally this was coming up to the Millennium. Suddenly, with so many local groups looking for some support in their efforts to mark this special time, a local freelance theatre director was in demand in Radnorshire, and we got involved in many things. 'A Little Below Heaven' at the Wyeside in Builth celebrated Builth's history for the last hundred years and led to the formation of Builth Wells Community Arts; 'Red Kite, Boda Wenol' developed into the Red Kite theatre group in Hay-on-Wye; we produced the Llanwrthwl pageant, and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' with the Mid Powys Youth Theatre. The Laura Ashley Foundation funded a programme 'Have-a-go Shakespeare' which still runs fortnightly. Like-minded people began muttering about the possibility of a 'mid-Wales Shakespeare Centre', and 'if you've got a Shakespeare Centre, then perhaps you'll need a theatre?'