Guest Blog: Peta Swindall on Seeing Little Angel Theatre Through Lockdown and Beyond

Little Angel Theatre, tucked away in a charming corner of Islington, north London, celebrates 60 years this autumn, during which time it has achieved international prominence. Far from being defeated by the pandemic, Little Angel found a renewed footing across live and digital work and is looking forward to a festive birthday, as executive director Peta Swindall explains below.

On 17 March 2020, Little Angel Theatre made the heart-breaking decision, along with hundreds of other theatres across the country, to close our doors - we had three fabulous shows open, a really exciting season lined up, and a whole host of brilliant community and participation projects running and in the pipeline. I had never used the term "furlough" before, but that was soon to change, and those first few days were filled with phone conversations with staff, freelancers and companies that we were in the middle of projects with, trying to salvage what we could and support everyone as far as possible in such uncertainty. We never dreamt that we would still have our doors closed 13 months later.

As the dust settled, Samantha [Lane, Artistic Director] and I felt strongly that we wanted to continue to offer something positive and creative. We both have young families at home, and as the schools closed about a week later, we wanted to help. So we kickstarted our digital offering, Watch, Make and Share, which we hoped would provide a free, accessible creative outlet for as many children as possible and support teachers and parents who were juggling jobs, home schooling and potentially facing financial hardship. It was also a great opportunity for us to keep engaged with and provide a level of work for some of our artists and freelance family.

We have been overwhelmed by the response to our digital content: we have nearly 14,000 YouTube subscribers, and our digital productions and puppet-making activities have been viewed and shared hundreds of thousands of times in over 90 countries around the world. We were awarded OnComm awards for several productions, with two of them making it through to the finals. We have also delivered several "live" shows (via Zoom), a summer festival (Puppet Picnic), transferred our professional development course and classes to a digital platform and - where restrictions allowed - we have continued to work in person to support our local community.

Little Angel Theatre first opened its doors on Sunday 24 November 1961, and so now in our 60th year we feel it's really important for us to look forward in a positive way as we hopefully start to progress out of this pandemic. We've aimed to mix live and digital offerings which we have curated this next season in order to celebrate our wonderful history but also to look to the future, inspiring children with joy and creativity, raising aspirations and engaging with the next generation of puppeteers!

We started the celebrations on 14 March with a "choose your own adventure"-style live digital production of Sean Taylor's Where the Bugaboo Lives (through 2 May), while in-person performances are still not possible. As restrictions begin to ease, we are working to restart our on-site activity by bringing to life Julia Donaldson's The Smartest Giant in Town in a new co-production with Fierylight. We will also be delivering a large scale community project, driven by a brand new Joseph Coelho poem - The Wishing Tree will see giant 'magical trees' appear throughout Islington populated by puppets made by local children - through their creativity a new production will be produced for them as part of a summer festival, inspired by their wishes for the future.

Alongside these events, we are committed to continuing with our digital output, which has brought us a different audience and reached people who otherwise would not be able to enjoy our productions. This programme includes a new series People Behind the Puppets, which celebrates 60 years of ground-breaking puppetry design as Little Angel's very own puppet "Angel'" nterviews makers including Toby Olié and Alison Alexander, who will all bring a fun, accessible puppet "make" for children watching along to create. We will continue to collaborate with exciting artists to release new short digital plays and puppet-making activities and look forward to adapting our suitcase show If Not Here...Where? to tour to children's hospitals and hospices.

We can't wait to share these projects with audiences both old and new, to feel the excited buzz in the foyer or to hear giggling school groups enjoying the exploits of a cheeky puppet as soon as it is safe to do so! These plans will take us through the summer as we will build up to the celebrations around the 60th birthday itself. We can't share those details just yet, but watch this space as we are all really excited!

People Behind the Puppets is available on YouTube and Where the Bugaboo Lives runs online until 2 May

Photos c. Ellie Kurttz