Making Conversation
Lancaster Arts’ Creative Producer, Alice Booth reflects on a recent event, Fatherhood and Masculinity, held in Lancaster Central Library and our developing approaches to public conversations.
Over the last few years at Lancaster Arts, we have tried to re-think the post-show talk – you know, the one where a theatre company presents a show, and then they sit down at the front of the stage and tell the audience about why and how they made it. The artists have opinions, and often interesting ones, on their process and what the work is all about. They’ve spent a long time testing out ideas and putting them together in the rehearsal room. Sometimes a panel are invited to this post-show talk, too – experts on the show’s themes perhaps – of migration, say, or ecological crisis. The audience question I always hear is: “Where do you get your ideas from?”. These talks are often chaired by someone who leads and directs the discussion. I have been to many of these talks.
At Lancaster Arts, much of our programme is built around exchange. We like creating the circumstances for conversations between strangers, and we like what is made possible through conversation. Conversations are interactive – audiences aren’t passive witnesses or questioners, as in the traditional post-show, but rather participants in an active dialogue. Everyone in the room can learn something, as ideas can be batted back and forth. Complex notions can be worked through, and those present can challenge themselves or others, or come away seeing things in a different light.
On the 1 March 2025, Lancaster Arts hosted a conversation about Fatherhood and Masculinity, with two theatre makers (and dads), Reece Williams and David Labi, who had made shows about their dominant fathers. Both shows were presented at the Nuffield in February – This Kind of Black and Pieces of a Man.
We also invited two further guests: Charlie Lewis, a Professor of Family and Developmental Psychology at Lancaster University, who has studied the role of the father in the family for over forty years and has a son and three grandsons. Also, Katy Linsley, who has supported many fathers and their wider families over three decades as a childcare professional and parenting instructor. She has two sons. The talk was facilitated, rather than chaired, by theatre director, producer and father of three, Matt Fenton.
That facilitation role is an important one. Instead of leading the session, Matt’s role was to guide the conversation in a way that allowed those taking part to have an active stake in what was discussed.
It was a small gathering of people, set in a circle, which leant itself to intimate exchange. There was a range of voices present – a couple of us from Lancaster Arts, invited guests, and participants that responded to an open invitation. Matt asked us to introduce ourselves, and offer why we had come, and our relationship to the subject material. He set the tone with an invitation to bring our experiences of having a father or being one. There were no experts. Rather, there was a level playing field created, which allowed us to feel comfortable, and importantly, welcome.
Matt introduced the idea that theatre is a place for practicing empathy. That is, indeed, what Reece and David brought to their own, autobiographical shows – they found empathy for their dead fathers, and for the children they were when their dad’s ruled their households. The conversation that unfolded worked across some difficult areas. For example, acceptance of negative feelings about a parent, violence being ingrained in young fathers that experience poverty and racism and how to heal your childhood trauma, and break cycles, when you become a parent yourself.
There were many moments where the conversation took off, where there was genuine engagement, where tender memories were revealed, where recollections and insights were had, where identifications were made between speakers and listeners.
One moment that drew my attention was David’s observation that it is ‘hard to experience your parents as human beings’. This comment really focused our conversation. All of us have such a specific experience of our parents. Both David and Reece, in researching their shows, interviewed many people that had encountered their dads over the years, to move beyond their childhood experiences of the family patriarch. They were trying to understand the sort of impact their father’s had had on a broad range of people, to get a wider, more nuanced perspective. In the conversation, we discussed the way that as grown-ups, we also understand our parents differently. That is, we may have more compassion for them given that we’ve had corresponding adult, and/or parenting experiences.
David and Reece, in different ways, also drew attention to the fact that in shaping artistic material, a certain distance is created. After all, it is in art spaces where we can make and remake our past, choose which stories to tell about our parents, or others, and look towards more edifying futures.
Indeed, it is in the greatest theatre or in interaction with the best art, where we can identify and feel close to what is in front of us, while having some perspective too. That is, have a degree of detachment that enables thinking and analysis. And it is in the best open-hearted conversations, that we can unpick and get under the skin of all this stuff that art, and by extension the world, has to offer.
Alice is a producer at Lancaster Arts. She has two daughters. She recently enjoyed collecting three car-fulls of driftwood for Henna Asikainen’s NEST which she helped make with Henna and the public on Sat 22 March. She’s looking forward to a special picnic lunch happening in the NEST on Thursday 27 March with more planned on Wednesday 2 April in Lancaster University Library and on Friday 11 April at a location in the West End of Morecambe. Find out more here.
