“There is nothing like face-to-face storytelling in the world”

that This is part two of our interview with the directors of Medway Play Lab, following last week's interview with Nic Lamont. This week, we return to the interview with both of them at Leonards Cafe in Store 104 to focus on Kate Mechedou and find out more about the work of Medway Play Lab, Mrs Baker's Medway Theatre Company, how to be better at improv, and the topic that could cause a disagreement between Kate and Nic...

What is your official occupation?  
Kate: If you'd asked me this a year ago, I would have said I'm a theatre maker. But I'm now officially a postgraduate researcher, with the University of Warwick, and it's a collaborative doctoral award that I'm working towards with English Heritage, through the Midlands Four Cities organisation. I also work six hours a week as a theatre maker as well. 

Do you have any additional roles, paid or unpaid?
Kate: I'm also a co-director of Medway Play Lab, which is a community interest company. I'm also the sole director of Mrs Baker's Medway Theatre Company.  As the name implies, it works predominantly in the Medway area. Part of what it does is produce the Medway Arts Tours, costumed live interpretation tours of Medway, mostly Rochester. They're the ones that sell and we do like to make money. I'm also a co-director of the Arches Local partnership, because I live in the Luton Arches area and have done for 25 years, so I'm quite invested. I know that's not very long compared to some people, but I've thrown my lot in this area. 

Don't self-censor, and we all self-censor all the time

What is an important improv lesson? 
Nic: Oh, there's so many. I always say to people that it's important not to try to be funny. I think if you try to be funny, your brain is taken up with trying to think of jokes or how am I coming across or 'Am I working towards a punch line,' and you're not in the moment. If you just let that go, be truly spontaneous, it's going to be funny, because it's going to be surprising, and it's going to be all your own ideas that no one can predict.  
Kate: I would capitalise on that further than saying my thing would be to play. Nobody's recording you, you're not going be blackmailed later. Don't self-censor, and we all self-censor all the time, and quite often I'm pushing people to go, 'Well, what would be the extreme of it?' Because when people start with improv, they tend to be a very polite sort. If you really disagree with your opponent, you might try and slap them or murder them. You don't want to go that far in real life, but you can play it out and see where the emotion takes you. 

What were the Wild Walks? 
Nic: Wild Walks was a project we did for families, where we worked with an amazing forager called Miles Irving, who has written many books on foraging. He's just a wonderful man to hang out with because his plant knowledge is quite magical, I would say. We decided to make a show that would include elements of foraging, but also be a narrative in green spaces across Medway.  
Kate: And beyond. 
Nic: I suppose that was really the first show we put together, technically. We first performed it as part of Gravesham Fringe, and then we performed it on Millennium Green. It's a really fun interactive family show, in the springtime, that really gets people looking at the plants around them and interested in the plants around them. Hopefully, going away from the show, thinking, 'I did not know that everything around me could be used for something in some way.'
Kate: They get to forage as part of the show and do a bit of pressing of leaves and various other activities as well. It's something that's on our back burner now and could be revived at any moment if the park service is listening. We are happy to look at any park (laughs). 

Theatre, shocker, doesn't make money

Will playreads and writing masterclasses be continuing past March?  
Nic: Oh, I hope so, because they've been so popular. We've been really enjoying bringing people together to read plays. This is a project we've been doing with funding from UKSPF and Medway Council, which means once a month, we have a group meet to read a play here in Store 104, and then the week after that, we have an expert in their field present a creative writing workshop. 
Kate: Part of the project is that we have to establish if people would be willing to pay for this going forward, and how much they would be willing to pay for it going forward. Would that cover the costs that are innately in it, which of course include the expert's fee, facilitation time, hire of the venue. We do like to make sure that a local business is properly rewarded. People are certainly enjoying it. There's a diverse collection of people come to the playreads, come to the creative writing workshops. I've absolutely adored the range of people we've had in the creative writing workshop as well. We're going to hopefully keep doing this and keep drawing them together. 

What is Mrs Baker's Theatre Company?  
Kate: About 2017, I knew I had to leave the job that I was in, working across the historical palaces. Every time I was directing something, as opposed to commissioning somebody else to direct it, it was becoming more overtly theatrical. I was thinking I need to go in that direction and not stick with the purist, live historical interpretation. I wanted to have people abseiling down buildings, explosions, demons… I was also thinking it's time to leave the company. I'd been there for too long. I started looking around for funding that could make that happen because I knew I couldn't do it. I'm not from generational wealth. I knew I needed to find backing for it. I looked around, and the first thing I found was an Anglo-Japanese organisation. I've always thought about the Japanese connection with the Medway Towns that was established, and the whole Will Adams story. It'd be great to have people in the shopping centre making that story come to life. I applied. I managed to get enough funding to make sure that I could get through a year. I started Mrs Baker's Medway Theatre Company on that.
Unfortunately, the timing meant that the first production was going to be part of the revived Chatham Carnival, which didn't happen because of lockdown. We moved online, we did things with Arches Local, and I was able to use my former colleagues from across the Historic Royal Palaces to do straight to camera pieces about local Medway characters, including the test pilot for the Short Brothers aeroplanes and William Cuffay. 
I knew that I needed one product that was going to keep generating income because theatre, shocker, doesn't make money. The Medway Arts Tour, the guided tour wing, is something I've always promoted and built up as a result. I've managed to achieve some SPF funding for training and recruitment of more historically costumed tour guides. We've now got a great little team but we need more people to speak French because we get quite a lot of bookings for French schools as well.
They don't always want us to do it in French, but it's useful sometimes. And on the project side, we did the Dickens anniversary and created a piece, a two-man one-act play called The Showman and the Chartist, about William Cuffay fictionally meeting Charles Dickens. Usually, there is a small creative team and professional actors in the middle of it, surrounded by a community cast. We do not have the scale of Icon [Theatre] yet, but they've been going a lot longer than we have.