Propa Penniless: a Performance by Cap-a-Pie
Precarious work can be grimly dramatic. Jobseeking sends you on wild goose chases, forcing you to pretend to be someone you feel you aren’t. Much of the work available to young people fails to alleviate their precarity, and force them into exposing, low-status encounters — with bosses, competitors and customers. Covid-19 removed personal interaction from work (though not for the most essentially and precariously employed); interactions were shifted online, where we spoke through pixelated personae of ourselves. In today’s bureaucratic culture, where rules and regulations feel more like a barrier to shield those in charge than a safety net to catch the vulnerable, a young worker coming up against the system might feel like they’re interacting with something uncannily other than human: a machine, a ghost, a robot.
Even in happier economic times, there’s an unacknowledged theatricality to the world of work. Many adults spend the majority of their working hours at the workplace, but we talk surprisingly little about its rituals and practices, perhaps because it’s the last thing we want to dwell on when we get home. This was the genius of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, creators of The Office: the insight that even somewhere as ostensibly boring as the headquarters of Wernham Hogg is the setting for scenes of extraordinary tension, comedy and pathos.
Nashe and Theatre
Our own interest in the theatricality of work was one reason to collaborate with Newcastle-based theatre company Cap-a-Pie as part of our project on Thomas Nashe and precarity. The result was ‘Propa Penniless’, a devised piece created in response to Nashe’s Pierce Penniless (1592), performed at the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle, 28 October 2022.
Another spur for this collaboration was our ongoing attempt to emphasise Nashe’s unacknowledged theatricality. The editing project from which ‘Penniless?’ follows has placed particular emphasis on Nashe as a dramatic writer, correcting a tendency to think of him as a writer squarely at home in prose forms — as Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, ‘the first of the English prose eccentrics’. We’d be more familiar with Nashe’s plays if they hadn’t so successfully outraged the great and the good. Nashe collaborated with Ben Jonson on a play, now lost, called The Isle of Dogs; the authorities suppressed the play and prosecuted its authors.
But Nashe’s engagement with London’s theatre amounted to much more than this self-sabotaging foray. His familiarity with playhouses and their culture is evident from his early work; critics no longer think of the spaces of theatre and print in antithesis (for a discussion of their symbiotic relationship, check out the third episode, about ‘Places and Spaces’, of our podcast series on Nashe’s world). There’s a good case to be made that Nashe had a hand in the first act of Shakespeare’s early history play, Henry VI Part One (first performed in 1592, and written after the success of the play now known as Henry VI Part Two). Perhaps Nashe made himself a reputation as a good ‘starter’ — a writer adept at dashing off a first act, and leaving it to his friends to continue.
Collaborating
Cap-a-Pie were new to Nashe, but specialise in collaborating with academics to bring research to life in the theatre. They also have recent experience working on themes adjacent to those explored in our research on precarity. In 2020 they staged (in a Covid-adapted online format) a rehearsed reading of Laura Lindow’s play Credit, based on testimony from those navigating the labyrinth of Universal Credit.
We worked closely with Brad McCormick, artistic director at Cap-a-Pie, and Katy Vanden, the company’s producer. We selected excerpts from Pierce Penniless which struck us especially theatrical: the parade of deadly sins, for example, in which Pierce — Nashe’s outspoken mouthpiece — portrays to the devil’s man the vices currently infecting London. (Re-editing this text from its forthcoming edition, adapting its footnotes for a non-specialist audience whose purposes were theatrical rather than scholarly, was an enjoyable challenge and a good reminder of how all editions attune themselves — however overtly — to particular audiences.) We also included the summaries from the interviews conducted in the summer for our oral history project, ‘In their own words’, on the experience of precarious work for young people and mature students. We hoped that this combination of contemporary and early modern source material would provoke some thematically and dramatically rich juxtapositions.
Propa Penniless
We weren’t disappointed! The performance devised under Brad’s direction was a resonant exploration of the social attitudes that create precarity, as well as the interactions — darkly terrifying and bleakly funny — that await those who find themselves precariously employed. Brad worked with three actors (Emily Corless, Rachel Stockdale and Mahsa Hammat Bahary) and an appropriately minimal set — a foldable screen and a few wooden chairs. Like this pared-back set their rehearsal methods, which incorporated material thrown up by improvisation and conversation, resonated with the ‘rough theatre’ of the Elizabethan age, as well as with Nashe’s own aesthetics of edgy extempore.
At the heart of ‘Propa Penniless’ was an irreverent take on Pierce’s description of London’s sins. The three actors brought Nashe’s figures — Pride, Envy, Gluttony & Co — to life with a clown-like irreverence and exaggeration, cutting Nashe’s florid metaphors with everyday comparisons and fragments of slang. Here the piece made imaginative use of our glosses, adapted from footnotes and shaken loose of some academic conventions: particularly opaque Nashean sentences were glossed by actors directly addressing the audience; this glossing rhythm, with its sudden lurching from florid to plain style, from enigma to plainness, captured Nashe’s own tendency to be looking over his shoulder and to catch himself in the act.
The sequence of sins was framed and interspersed with scenes inspired by the summaries of our oral history interviews; in rehearsals, Brad encouraged the actors, all of whom have direct experience of precarity as young people trying to forge creative careers, to share their similar experiences.
‘Propa Penniless’ (the title, and its implied Geordie pronunciation, alludes to the actors’ roots and those of the company in the north east) also included an inventive take on Nashe himself. At the beginning of the piece Nashe was split into three, each actor assuming one of his characteristic personae: the cocky wit; the angry young commentator; the stylish but self-conscious performer. It ended with the slipping of the mask: the actors spoke directly to us — though in each other’s words — about their motivations for the precarious career they had embarked on.
To accompany and record the performance, we worked with Newcastle-based freelancer Lindsay Duncanson to make a short documentary film. It features excerpts from the devised piece and glimpses into the rehearsal process, with some commentary from those of us working on the ‘Penniless?’ project: Archie Cornish, Kate de Rycker and Cathy Shrank. The film demonstrates, we hope, the value of collaboration between academic and creative approaches. We wanted this aspect of the project to provoke new thinking and start conversations, among and beyond the humanities and the creative world, and for this reason we paid lots of attention to how our audience responded. We staged a Q&A session immediately following the performance, and asked the audience to fill in questionnaires.
Feedback
Exploring the responses of our audience reflects some of the tensions latent both in ‘Propa Penniless’ and our work as a whole. Our audience was mainly drawn from academic, creative and social initiative networks in Newcastle, and many (though not all) watching had prior interest and engagement in the material from one of several angles: Nashe, precarity, the usefulness of art and creativity for young people. Our questionnaires asked audience members whether they found ‘the theme relevant to today’s world’, and many of the answers expressed versions of ‘yes, unfortunately’. It struck those unfamiliar with Nashe as incredible that a socio-economic situation that obtained in the 1590s has returned. This doesn’t imply a naive belief in the orderly progress of social justice through history. Yet it does show an awareness of precarity as a condition that feels pre-modern: chaotic, whimsical, highly personal and bodily. So much of twentieth-century social reform was about trying to build buffers against precarity, but those buffers no longer work. They’ve become barriers in a clunky and often cruel system that has failed to tackle precarity.
‘The use of female performers added a new dimension’, one audience member commented. Exposure to the casual misogyny of patriarchal workplaces is a good example of the precarity which modern economics should have replaced, but has ended up compounding. The piece featured a particularly comic transition, where the pageant’s movement into ‘Lust’ suddenly abandoned Nashe’s words, replacing them with three lads shifting tin in the gym, swapping stories of sexual conquests. The obvious, parodic juxtaposition of women actors and hyper-male characters drew laughs, but they were knowing laughs.
Something we regularly confront on the ‘Penniless?’ project is that Nashe, for all his deft posturing, is not ‘one of the people’: his plight is of a highly educated young man disappointed and frustrated by the lack of opportunity to penetrate elite fields of employment — and perhaps this frustration is itself a figure for something even more rarefied, which is Nashe’s own internal reluctance to take the conforming opportunities theoretically available to him. Nashe did not come from money, and had little to fall back on, but could feasibly have secured a position in the church, teaching at school, or as a chancery clerk; perhaps he didn’t want to, and perhaps such opportunities didn’t arise. The paradox of Nashe’s writing on precarity is that he describes a situation pertaining to the cultural elite — well-educated but insecurely employed young writers — in terms that strike a chord with other, more widespread and contemporary experiences of precarity.
A divergence in audience responses about relevance expresses this paradox. For some, ‘Propa Penniless’ was about the problems which befall young people trying to establish creative careers: as one audience member put it, ‘the same issue we all face, the questions around living an artistic life’. But for others, the piece was about the deeper and more fundamental kinds of precarity that prevail in today’s economy: ‘these issues are longstanding and need to change’; ‘some of the issues I see in my work are even more extreme than the ones you included’. ‘Lovely to see daily struggles in play’, commented one audience member, finding something relatable but also pleasurable in these ‘daily struggles’. The playfulness of the piece achieved a light (though satirically irreverent) tone which is often missing from how our establishment culture narrates precarity. Mass media is currently shining a light on the cost-of-living crisis; it’s also saturated with stories told by people who overcame hard times. But we rarely hear from people who are in the middle of making it; we don’t hear stories of everyday precarity before it lapses into full crisis, or bears fruit.
Limits
Relatable to whom? The struggles of young creatives overlap, of course, with those enduring the most fundamental forms of socio-economic precarity — those for whom the primary question is not ‘how can I be an artist and pay the bills?’ but ‘how can I pay the bills?’. They overlap not just because the arts are open — though decreasingly so — to people from working-class backgrounds, but also because the vast majority of young creatives balance their artistic work with part-time, precarious jobs in hospitality, retail or other sectors. But there’s an undeniable tension here, which is that the precarity of the young artist is not always the same as that of the striking nurse, or postal worker, or immigrant, trying to stay afloat in hostile conditions.
‘As a young person’, one audience member commented, ‘it did feel like stuff that is already well-known and very familiar, so not really new / groundbreaking’. It’s worth dwelling on this constructive piece of criticism, because it highlights structural and institutional challenges for the kind of work our project is trying to accomplish. We must remember that some experiences which strike researchers and artists as shockingly new are, to the most socio-economically exposed, old hat. Of course, there’s plenty of precarity in academia and the arts, especially for young people. But they remain dominated by middle-class perspectives, and thus have their blind spots. Precarity is a kind of knowledge.
Our Q&A discussion was lively and stimulating. All three academics working on the project were joined onstage by Brad and all the actors, to reflect on the making and meaning of ‘Propa Penniless’. Katy Vanden, producer at Cap-a-Pie, pointed out valuably that most of those who participated in the discussion were university researchers — despite representation in the audience of several other sectors and fields, such as creative initiatives and social enterprises. Our conversation was informal and supportive in tone. But its structure was academic, featuring detailed questions and digressive answers. As Katy put it, when a university works with creative partners, it’s often the case that ‘its culture overrides’. We should be more aware of our blind spots as academics who work with conventions and structures which make more sense to us than those outside institutions. We might have thought of different ways to format the discussion so that we could have the opportunity to hear from people with different experiences: for example, turning more consciously in the Q&A to voices from outside academia; or facilitating anonymous written questions.
Participants
We asked the actors whether they’d like to reflect on making the piece, and how its themes resonated with them. Emily Corless found lots to like in Nashe, despite the unsavoury nature of some of his implied views. His satirical energy — ‘roguish, boyish, vulgar with his language’ — is tempered by his ability to self-deprecate, his awareness that his critiques could rebound. In this respect she found Nashe ‘empathetic’.
‘Reading Pierce Penniless for the first time’, writes Rachel Stockdale, ‘I really connected with his bitterness as a freelancer and it made me think there’s a Pierce persona in all of us’. Precarious work can make us oddly compliant, keen to ingratiate ourselves. Perhaps we benefit from re-connection with the frustration of precarity, its capacity to act as a spur to changing the system. Rachel describes herself as a ‘benefit-class theatre-maker… an anomaly who has slipped through the net’ (once again, this isn’t a safety net, but a social filter, a net of exclusion). ‘Being a freelancer today, with the cost of living crisis, little pension options and no time for illness or accidents, it is incredibly precarious. I think I had slightly numbed myself to this lifestyle, so it was good for me to personally readdress it’.
Emily spoke also about the place of courage in the freelance artistic career, both in Nashe’s time and today. Nashe’s satirical portrayal of the nobly precarious writer reminded her of the utopian forms of encouragement she sometimes receives: the vague notion that ‘if you quit that job and put more energy into your art, so many more things would happen for you’. Of course, this is easier said than done, and the capacity to take risks is not independent of socio-economic status: the more financial and social stability you have to fall back on, the more courageous you can be. We need to talk less airily about individual courage and more practically about networks of solidarity and support.
‘There was something comforting’, commented Mahsa Hammat Bahary, ‘about about knowing that no matter what time period you live in, being in the arts is always a bit of a precarious career path!’ This note of admirable optimism suggests a key insight: one benefit of taking a long view of precarity, as our project does, is to free us from the overwhelming sense that the conditions we face are unique. This is not to normalise or excuse precarity: we should hope and expect to live in a world in which we don’t have to take such exposing risks and make such sacrifices. But knowing that other cultures and other artists have tussled with precarity liberates us from the often exhausting perspective that thinks of precarious work only as a current crisis.
Brad’s own reflections on making this piece are available here, but he also wrote to us reflecting on his experience of directing the piece. ‘If I were his friend’, he says of Nashe, ‘I think I’d probably worry about him. He seems troubled, unhappy and intensely dissatisfied’. Like the actors, Brad was new to Nashe, but found in his work an indication of what gave this ‘unhappy and intensely dissatisfied’ young man the energy to keep going. ‘I think you can tell that he loves to write or is compelled to write’. Often it’s artistic work, the magic of creativity, which banishes all the overwhelming feelings of precarity — even as the life of an artist is thrown open to them. ‘Devising the characters as an all-female ensemble’, writes Rachel, ‘was incredibly cathartic’. Mahsa agrees: ‘I loved working with the girls and Cap-a-Pie… it was all very collaborative’. In precarious times, collaboration and creativity offer a form of solidarity which is as enduring and sustaining as any.
You can read more about Cap-a-Pie here, and watch the short documentary film here [link coming]. Thanks to Brad, Katy and Ree at Cap-a-Pie, to all the actors, Lindsay and all others who produced the film, the team at Star and Shadow, and to our audience.
