From locking playwrights up until a drama emerged to dreaming up Sarah Kane’s Crave in a pub; the talent behind half a century of innovation reveal their secrets
It began over a pint in a Bedford pub. Fifty years later, Paines Plough is a theatrical trailblazer. Dedicated to new plays, the company has presented the work of pivotal dramatists such as David Pownall, Sarah Kane, James Graham, Kae Tempest, Mike Bartlett – and more than 300 others. Actors who have gone on the road with the company include Harriet Walter, Peter Capaldi, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw and Andrew Scott. To mark its half-century, the key players remember the company’s fights, firsts and furious creativity.
John Adams (founding artistic director): We all met in Bedford, where I was living, and went for a drink to a pub called the Plough, where the beer was brewed by a St Neots company called Paines, in 1974. A wonderful actor called Chris Crooks had asked the playwright David Pownall to write him a one-man play. Andrew Leigh, the general manager at the Edinburgh Lyceum, said we could use the studio for three performances in the 1975 fringe. The play, Crates on Barrels, was about a disciple of Diogenes the Cynic who lived in a barrel so we drove up to Edinburgh pulling a trailer with an eight-foot barrel: we had to cut it in two to get it into certain places.
