Guest Blog: Director Kirsty Patrick Ward on Collaboration, Rejuvenation and Development of MANIC STREET CREATURE

As a Director, reviving a show you’ve directed before can be a rare thing these days. To get another bite at the cherry is a gift, but it comes with a challenge, because what do you have to navigate now? Expectations. You’ve been a part of something that people love, helped to make something that has moved and inspired audiences and now you have to recapture the lighting in a bottle.

Theatre is simultaneously indelible and ephemeral. When you’re meeting with someone about a new project and they haven’t seen a piece of your work that you’re really proud of, you feel like saying  ‘It was great! Honestly, audiences loved it’. Of course you have reviews, but they don’t always capture the feeling a show has created, how it has changed a space and transported an audience.

I always watch the last show of any production of mine, and title a page in my notebook ‘If you were to do it again, what would you change?’ Your hope is that these bullet points come to fruition, but also that you’ll have the support and resources to actually action them.

The truth is that you can never exactly recapture what you had before, because shows are living, breathing entities. You have to grow them again, give them all your hard-earned knowledge from previous iterations, but also give yourself the freedom to try new things - give the show space to embody new spaces, and have enough vision for it to reach new heights. How do you do this? By dreaming big, working hard and nurturing the show’s soul. By knowing the show's worth, and never taking for granted what made it special in the first place.

When Maimuna and I met for a coffee back in 2022 I’d seen a twenty minute recording of a workshop at the National Theatre Studio directed by Bill Buckhurst, and read a very early draft of Manic Street Creature. The songs, the scenes, Maimuna’s phenomenal voice and the subject matter really spoke to me. I knew this project was special. It had a strong point of view and asked so many pertinent questions. How do you help the person you love when they’re in a battle with their own brain? Who cares for the carer? Where does the need to fix someone else come from? Is medication the complete answer? Or to quote our protagonist Ria, can it be ‘hard to know what’s worse, too much feeling or too little.’

Three sweaty July weeks in Deptford was where the show’s first production was created. Tea breaks were replaced by ice cream breaks, it was so hot that instruments were going out of tune - but each day Maimuna would come in with new material, and with Rachel [Barnes] and Yusuf [Memon] we’d carve out new songs and scenes.

We weren’t an overnight success in Edinburgh, it took a while to find our audience - but thanks to them and with Fringe First, Stage, and a Mental Health award wins, we were on our way, and would bring the show to the mighty Southwark Playhouse a year later with our new band member Harley [Johnston]. Our runs in Edinburgh and Southwark were in the round, but in my notebook I wrote ‘next time, new configuration?’

When Maimuna told me that the Kiln and Gary Beestone Associates were interested in bringing Manic Street Creature back my heart leapt at the thought. That stage, those producers, the space for the show to finally grow in so many ways, including an extra band member - this is what the production had always been crying out for.

Theatre is about storytelling, it’s about abstraction, it’s about collaboration, it’s about ambition and it’s about continuing to challenge yourself. But it’s also about holding on to your vision, holding on to what made the show so powerful originally, and what you personally loved about it in the first place.

Whether you’ve seen Manic Street Creature before or not, come check us out at the Kiln - I hope you’ll see what I mean.

Watch: "Set This House On Fire" music video from the show here.