Shared Experience: sharing the work

Shared Experience is certainly living up to its name; in a radical departure from normal theatre conventions, the company is currently sharing part of its rehearsal process with audiences as it develops Helen Edmundson’s latest work, Mary Shelley, which tells the astonishing story of how Shelley came to write Frankenstein at the age of only 18.

The play is co-produced by Shared Experience with West Yorkshire Playhouse (where the open rehearsal first had a run-out as part of the theatre’s Transform season last month), Nottingham Playhouse and Oxford Playhouse, where SE is now the resident company. The full-length version of Mary Shelley will tour next year, directed by SE’s joint artistic director Polly Teale.

I was part of the audience at the Bodleian Library in Oxford last night, where Teale and six actors rehearsed a few scenes from the play - fittingly, in Convocation House where Percy Bysshe Shelley was sworn in for his short and ill-fated stay at the university. Teale and the actors showed us some of the mechanisms through which they discover the characters’ inner lives and the play’s subtext, and provided a rare opportunity for theatre-goers to see the acting process. It was a pleasure to witness the art of good acting and I felt privileged to be there.

The Mary Shelley experiment comes soon after Shared Experience, astonishingly, lost its entire Portfolio Funding in the Arts Council England cuts announced earlier this year. How such an innovative and pioneering - not to mention multi-award-winning - company can be dealt such a catastrophic blow is beyond me.

• Shared Experience are at the Bodleian Library’s Convocation House, Oxford, tonight and tomorrow (sold out)
  
• Find Mary Shelley on Amazon