Focus on: Breach Theatre

Though still firmly rooted in history, It's True, It's True, It's True marks a new phase for award-winning company Breach Theatre

feature (edinburgh) | Read in About 3 minutes
Published 26 Jul 2018
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“We still don’t know who we are completely,” says Ellice Stevens, co-founder of political theatre company Breach. “We don’t want to be pigeonholed because we want to learn more.” Billy Barrett, Stevens' co-founder and the company’s primary director, suggests that the company "wanted a shorter process because it allows us to work instinctively", in a manner different to the development of their previous shows.

It’s True, It’s True, It’s True marks Breach's third Fringe. Their first show, The Beanfield, which explored the ethics of historical reenactment, won the Total Theatre Award for Best Emerging Company in 2015. Their second show, Tank, garnered further glowing reviews, and now they return to Edinburgh with a show which moves away from their recognisable aesthetic of, as Barrett puts it, a “very clinical stage world and very visceral film world”.

It’s True... is a verbatim courtroom drama from a 17th-century trial in which Artemisia Gentileschi, a hugely talented young woman who would go onto become the best known female painter of the Italian Baroque, accused her older male tutor of rape. "It’s also about her artistic response to the trauma, and how she used her art as a form of justice that was denied to her in the court," says Barrett.

The show sees Breach pushing their practice in new directions. “This is the first show where we’re playing embodied characters and there’s not a film element," says Barrett. "It’s important that it’s three women who are standing up and speaking and things aren’t distanced by being on a screen," Stevens goes on.

It’s an intriguing step for a company known for their multimedia style, one hugely influenced by Breach's third co-founder, film-maker Dorothy Allen-Pickard. Allen-Pickard's role on It's True... is necessarily very different from on previous shows, explains Stevens. “Dorothy is dramaturg, so that when she comes into rehearsal she’s viewing it from quite an outsider perspective." 

Film may not be physically present, but it has a place in the show nonetheless, Stevens goes on. Gentileschi's paintings offer a sort of "filmic inspiration", she says. "That’s where the film is living."

There are inevitable links between this sexual abuse trial and the current cultural climate. “As someone who knows what it’s like to be a woman in this world, that’s what I’m bringing to it. We really just want to tell her story, and as modern women wanting to tell that story now, you have to ask why.”

Barrett agrees: “All we can do is tell this one story, because as soon as you think of your show as more important than it is, then we’ve tried to say too much and said nothing at all."

Stevens nods. “The show says a lot about what women are doing for each other at the minute. That’s the biggest link I’m seeing. It's not revelling in a woman’s pain in the way that so many plays today still do. We didn’t think we’d laugh as much as we have but we also have done loads of screaming and crying – if you’re going to go that dark you have to find the light."