Nell Hardy & Rory Darling

So, could you give me a little introduction about what you do? What your art form is?

I am an actor, writer, theatre director and facilitator. I'm the founder of my own company called Response Ability Theatre, which specialises in representing and supporting people whose lives have been derailed by some kind of trauma. So I have an advanced practice that's specifically around trauma informed work, and helping people who carry some kind of mental health trauma around with them to find creative, fun, playful and non-triggering ways of making sense of that for themselves, and also for being able to express themselves to others, and assert their needs. I also work with service providers to help them work with the most vulnerable people without re-traumatising them. I've also done a lot with young people, especially at-risk young people in some way, whether through emotional vulnerability, or through coming from underprivileged backgrounds. I'm very passionate about helping people find pathways into professional arts work. As a facilitator, I'm pretty physical, but I also use the body to facilitate words. So I love putting a pen in people's hands just as I love putting a skip in people's step.

Amazing. I love that. That sounds incredible, especially the trauma practice. Do you work with any particular groups under that? Is all your work through a trauma informed lens?

I mean, it's a matter of focus and extent, a lot of the time. The workshops that I run through my company, as opposed to externally like for Writerz and Scribez, I always say they're designed for the most vulnerable of people, but you don't necessarily have to identify with any particular mental health condition or as having suffered from any particular trauma. We've all been through things that we find hard to talk about. I think the work comes from a place of allowing yourself to ask the questions that normally you don't allow yourself to ask, or to communicate on a level that you don't normally allow yourself to communicate. We all have those barriers and my practice is all about being allowed to ask those questions that we don't ask every day.

Amazing. Do you tend to run with a theme throughout your workshops?

It depends on what the brief is. If I'm going to a specific group of people, I'll want to know what they've done before and what their specific needs are at that particular time, or if they've expressed any particular interests. And I want to take that into consideration. I try not to do things like, for example, go into a group of people with lived experience of homelessness and immediately do a project about homelessness because, I mean, some people want to be doing stuff about that but some people want to do something completely different. Some people don't want to be defined by the particular box that they're filling at any particular point. As a baseline approach, I see what people we have in the room, I see what energies we've got, I see what themes naturally start coming out, and then we start running with those. Otherwise I do it by listening to the people I'm there for and finding out what they want.

Do you have any particular work you're excited to do with Writerz and Scribez? Or any ideas you've got popping around? Or is it just very much just like how you approach your workshops, which is not prescriptive, but you go with it and see where you end up?

To be honest, I have no idea what's going to come my way yet. So yeah, absolutely. It may be that the skills I have already are exactly what a group needs. It may be that I get challenged in ways I hadn't anticipated and end up learning loads of new stuff. I kind of hope that happens! I'm really interested in how my company can be informed by the groups that I come in touch with, and also how the groups that I come in touch with can make relationships with my company. I'm also really looking forward to meeting a bunch of the other facilitators as well and seeing what makes everyone else tick.

Amazing. Why is drama important to you, and what potential do you see within drama? I know you've touched on it already.

Yeah, this idea of a space where you can communicate genuinely with someone. I can't remember what the exact statistic is but in this country, certainly something like 85% of spoken language is used to disguise how you feel rather than say how you feel. There's so much language that isn't spoken and so much communication happens through body language. I think that over the pandemic, with Zoom conversations etc, we've really started realising that there are so many communicative forces that we just ignore a lot of the time. That especially is at the heart of my work with social care providers. That you cannot cut off the emotional side of communication when working with someone, you just cannot do it. Drama, for me, is a place where you can ask dangerous questions and go to dangerous places under the safety net of fiction. And find out what happens.

Do you have any key people who have inspired you along your way?

My whole way of thinking about my craft changed considerably when I became homeless. I was training as an actor. And then everything went wrong. I'd already done a lot of facilitating for people with learning difficulties and for young people, so was engaged socially on some level, but I didn't realise just how crucial it was to social mobility and to equal rights to expression in society until that happened and my creativity carried me through really tough times in a way that I saw other people who were in similar boats to me just didn't have that outlet. This is very much not answering your question, but that's kind of why the people that I'm going to be talking about are people that I've come across quite recently, or they're people who others wouldn't necessarily have come across.

So there's a woman called Liz Sacre, who was the director of the youth theatre where I was as a young person, and when I became homeless and when everything went wrong for me, she kind of stepped in loco parentis and helped me on psychological levels and on creative levels. She was one of the few people who understood how valuable staying creatively engaged was to my mental health improvement and to my being able to maintain my spirit whilst jumping through the hoops of various social injustices. And she's now actually retrained as a counsellor.

My Outreach Programme around my shows for my company was designed under the mentorship of Kate Flatt, who is a choreographer and facilitation expert, and a wonderful woman, really, really kind and generous and genuinely interested in a way that most people who have OBE after their name you wouldn't expect it. And another guy called Rob Gee, who's just a total legend. He's been a mental health nurse for 30 years and he's also a stand up poet. He's really down to earth but has such a berth of experience and positive spirit. I think anybody who manages to be in this industry, where you constantly have to big yourself up to be able to get any kind of data whatsoever to show what good you can do, and come out of it without ego and with a smile on your face, and with time for other people, is definitely in my good books.

That's incredible. Thank you so much for sharing. Have you seen in other people the changes that have come up for them from doing this kind of creative expression? Any moments that stick in your memory?

I think so, yeah. With this kind of thing, it's always really difficult when you only spend a couple of hours a week with someone or even when you've only been with them for a couple of hours. And then something great happens in their life... you're always wary of not wanting to take all of the credit for it. But I definitely think I've contributed to a lot of those experiences. When I first came out of homelessness, one of the first things that I did was start a Young Company at Jacksons Lane for young people who find traditional routes into careers in theatre inaccessible, for whatever reason. And in the first year of working with them, we had some really vulnerable young people. We had somebody who had been a drug dealer as our music director and he'd been groomed into gangs at the age of 12. He left with an offer of a place at a film school and is now a graduate.

A number of people from that company kind of have come in thinking that people of their ethnicity don't get to be involved in theatre, and are now making their own work or have agents and are studying. One girl who was incredibly shy, to the extent that she could barely speak the first time I met her, we took part in NT Connections, and one year we actually got to the final and performed at the National itself. And she opened the play. This girl who couldn't speak before was then projecting her voice at the back of the National Theatre, like incredible.

I've had experiences of running workshops with people who have then said to me afterwards, I'm never gonna forget this, or people who just haven't had that opportunity before that. I could have cried... I once worked with a woman who had just come out of domestic abuse and homelessness around that. My solo show was the first thing that she'd seen in any theatre ever. Absolutely, ever. And then she came to a workshop and just totally owned it right from the start. Like, she was a performer. I just couldn't believe that she was an instant performer.

I think it's about giving people those little nudges, or just opening a teeny tiny crack in the door a little bit further for them. You can't take credit for what happens beyond that, but you can say that you were there.

Yeah, it's incredible. I don't know what to say... just, amazing. Thank you so much for sharing all that with me. It makes me angry that the arts are so devalued, you know?

Mate, this is something that I'm really, really hoping that my company can address. I mean, social prescribing is starting to be a buzz term, and people are starting to understand the value of artists working with people with mental health problems, or with various physical problems and/or in socially tenuous situations, but there's still this kind of atmosphere of cynicism around it, where it's seen as something which is just a bit of fun for them, not something crucial to their well being. But also, my work with social care providers is quite nuanced and unusual and I've not really seen anyone else offering this. If we can get more artists doing that kind of work and helping people in the professions of people who are doing actual work with actual people, how much more are the arts going to be respected? When people can see actual change being made, directly in society. So it takes a little bit of imagination to see why a play in a theatre contributes to society, but it absolutely does. 100% without any doubt whatsoever, but it takes a little bit of imagination to see it.

Yeah, I think that's so important. It's making me think about how we can better make the arts accessible for everyone. So it's not seen as something reserved only for certain people. You know, people think, 'oh, there's arty types, that's not me'. When we're younger, we feel so able to express ourselves through art. And I feel like, maybe for a lot of people, for whatever life throws at them, we kind of lose that.

It's really interesting, I kind of had the reverse experience. Because I grew up in quite an abusive household, I wasn't allowed to express myself. What people traditionally say happens is, at first, with your innocence, you don't have any kind of art forms to compare yourself to, so you just create, and then the more you get to know, the more you're educated, and the more you're told, this person is a master of this, and that person's a master of that, the more you try to copy the masters, and then it becomes less authentic. And then you kind of have to wiggle your way through and find that childish beginning with all of your knowledge in the background and informing you in a non-intrusive way. But I kind of had the intrusion right from the start. Then when I had an experience that allowed me to break free from that and see who I really was and what I really cared about, I went from someone who always had their head in a book to someone who just couldn't listen to music and couldn't read books for a bit of time, because I just had to write and I just had to play and perform and I couldn't take in any extras, because there was so much that needed to burst out of me first.

Amazing, thank you. I was wondering what your relationship with poetry is? Is it something that inspires your work?

I've always loved poetry. I have poetry going around in my head the way people have songs going around in theirs. But when I was in mental health care, which I was for 19 months, for the first year of that I wrote a poem and a song every single day. And that was kind of how I kept hold of my own truth at a time when all sorts of different versions of the truth were being thrown at me. And a lot of my playwriting process starts with poetry. My style is very much on the cusp between poetry and everyday speech. I try to find that kind of midway point, partly as a way of making it a language that is immediately identifiable and feels real, but also isn't exclusive to one social class or to one geographical area, or to one set of experiences. I try to write stories that reflect on genuine lived experience and very specific, very authentic things, but then universalize that and find what the human experience is in that and what everybody can identify with. And that's where poetry for me really comes into that process. It makes something both specific and universal.

I think what you do is amazing and I relate to it a lot. I think I have a special connection to it, as well, because of the trauma informed stuff. I think that is so important. I think it's wonderful what you've managed to do... how you grow through everything, and are still constantly giving and using what you've been through to lift others. I think that's beautiful.