Adventure Play

There’s this place in Plas Madoc, in Wales, called The Land. It’s an adventure playground.

I’ve never been there, but I think about it all the time.

I know about it because someone brilliant called Erin Davis made a documentary about it. The documentary is also called The Land, and it captures this magical place in the most beautiful way.

More importantly, it captures the children who play there. Leaping across old shipping crates. Burning bits of rubbish. Swinging in old car tyres. Smashing snowballs with a homemade snowball-smasher.

You watch them build stuff and break stuff and create new stuff out of the stuff that they burnt and broke.

It’s beautiful.

It’s beautiful because they’re doing exactly what they want. And the adults are helping them do it. That’s not something we see very much, in our world and we’re so much richer for it when it happens.

When I watch The Land I feel a mix of excitement and fear and wonder. It feels like I’m watching another world: a mud-filled, junkyard utopia where kids have all the control. A world which runs on joy, play, risk and old bits of rubbish that take on new meaning in muddy hands.

I’m obsessed. It’s just absolutely the most beautiful thing in the world.

Since I first watched it a few years ago, I’ve done a whole load of learning about adventure playgrounds and playwork.

I’ve taken a load of artists to play in an adventure playground in Bethnal Green.

I’ve taken a load young people to play in another one near Caledonian Road.

I’ve learnt about risk, destruction, loose parts, mediating objects, playwork.

I’ve and talked to playworkers, academics and Erin herself about it.

I’ve filled a warehouse with loads of junk and left a bunch of Company Three members in there to play for a day.

I’ve tried, as much as I can, to bring some of that freedom, autonomy and risk-taking into the work I do with young people. But it only goes so far, because the key thing about adventure play is the space – and we’re never in a space where we can really play take risks.

I wish I could find that space.

Because I think that if we could find a way of layering the principles of adventure play with some of the mechanisms of theatre, we could make the most extraordinary space for teenagers to create.

A place in which they might retain and rediscover the play that was there in their bodies just a few years ago. A place in which they might ally that play with their newly found desire to express themselves. What a combination that would be.

A few years ago I started to develop an idea for a very real space that would do this. A kind of theatre adventure playground.

I imagined a large, rough room. Part rehearsal room, performance space, junkyard, workshop, playground.

A space in which everything could be moved by anyone in the space. Architecture, staging, objects, stuff, costumes, lights, sound, music, words, gravity, each other.

A space where young people would be experts and curators. A space in constant transition, changing through the agency of the people inside it.

A space to build shows out of moveable things, as well as bodies and words. To create a set, a space for an audience, a whole world - slowly and iteratively, changing constantly.

And not just shows. Meals, dances, massive games of hide and seek, parties, discussions, protests, spontaneous happenings. Tiny moments in the edgelands between process and production.

It would be a living organism. Teenagers as its lifeblood. A metaphor for the complexity and nuance of co-creation. Sometimes we would let other adults in, generously, but always on the young people’s terms.

I genuinely think it would change the way we make theatre with young people forever.

We haven’t built it yet.

We haven’t built it because finding any space is hard – and hardest still in a place like Islington, where Company Three are based and property is scarce.

We haven’t built it because it feels huge and daunting - and maybe because I’m a bit scared to do it.

Or because I can’t quite justify it in terms of money, or impact, or anything beyond just a feeling deep in my stomach that it would change everything.

Because there’s always something else to do.

And, you know … the pandemic, and -

And.

I really want to do it.

In some way I hope someone will read this and email me and say – Ned, I think I can help you.

Maybe they’ll have a space, or some money, or an idea.

Because we need it, don’t we?

This space where young people could smash things up and start again. Where they could gain some control for once in their lives. Where they could create in a way we’ve never seen young people create before.

It sounds like a utopia.

I like utopias.

We need utopias right now, I think.

We need them more than ever.