May Contain Nuts started out life in the fevered imagination of Gerald Maiello, the drama therapist attached to what was Watford Assessment and Therapy Services. His two Drama Therapy sessions that ran in Shrodells, the psychiatric wing at Watford General Hospital spawned our theatre company, a group of service users with little to no acting ability save the efforts we made during Drama Therapy.
Posters were put up and in May 2012 the first meeting assembled. Most of us had decided to come along mainly to be with the friends made in those Drama Therapy sessions. Few of us got the reference in the intended name of 'The Rude Mechanicals' and one of the first things we did as a company was scrap Gerald's name and cheerfully brand ourselves "May Contain Nuts".
This irreverent humour, the ties of friendship and the desire to examine what mental health issues mean and how they affect our lives has characterised the company from day one.
Our first piece started with one character sat 'on stage' saying "I am a man" and grew to be Insidious Baggage, in which the relationships of four characters, and their private and public relationships with issues of mental health, are examined unflinchingly and with the insight only experience of the subject matter can give.
It is worth mentioning at this point that our stage was the lounge at WA&TS. For the rest of the year we rattled around the cosy confines of that lounge, its adjacent rooms and the more spacious 'rehearsal' room accessed through the Acute Day Therapy Unit. We were in the very bowels of Mental Health service provision.
Posters were put up and in May 2012 the first meeting assembled. Most of us had decided to come along mainly to be with the friends made in those Drama Therapy sessions. Few of us got the reference in the intended name of 'The Rude Mechanicals' and one of the first things we did as a company was scrap Gerald's name and cheerfully brand ourselves "May Contain Nuts".
This irreverent humour, the ties of friendship and the desire to examine what mental health issues mean and how they affect our lives has characterised the company from day one.
Our first piece started with one character sat 'on stage' saying "I am a man" and grew to be Insidious Baggage, in which the relationships of four characters, and their private and public relationships with issues of mental health, are examined unflinchingly and with the insight only experience of the subject matter can give.
It is worth mentioning at this point that our stage was the lounge at WA&TS. For the rest of the year we rattled around the cosy confines of that lounge, its adjacent rooms and the more spacious 'rehearsal' room accessed through the Acute Day Therapy Unit. We were in the very bowels of Mental Health service provision.
Shrodells, our first home
Gerald had been coaching us towards a performance for an invited audience of the staff and our friends and family, to take place in the rehearsal room at Shrodells, when we were ready. The date was yet to be set, leaving us without the pressure of a deadline. The date of a performance for second year Clinical Psychology students at Hertfordshire University was set for December. Again the pressure was mitigated, this time by the assurance that we need only perform an excerpt, whatever we had ready at the time. We were all excited, if nervous, at being able to have some small influence on the next generation of mental health professionals. We wanted to show them a little of what we experience on the receiving end of services and the sort of journeys we'd had to even get to the point of contact.
As it happened, we were ready to show them the finished piece and performed it again the next week for our invited audience.
The response to both performances was beyond gratifying. The sense of having not just accomplished something that was in itself a difficult and complicated project, but that this project, our first baby, was worthwhile, significant and stood a chance of providing insight, raising awareness and reducing stigma... words really can't begin to do that feeling justice.
Not to labour the point, but before May Contain Nuts we had all been mentally ill and seriously struggling with our day to day lives. We were attending and benefiting from WA&TS but just leaving the house was still an issue for some of us. The thought of talking to strangers could induce panicked meltdown and depression and anxiety were never far enough away.
We'd love to say "we are all cured now!" but of course we're not. But we are better than we were. We still have times of crisis, ups and downs, good days, bad days and downright hellish days but this thing that we started just keeps getting stronger and we all want to stick around to see that happen, to make that happen. Which is pretty huge.
Over Christmas the long awaited move to Colne House on Upton Road finally happened and is currently home, as it has been since 2013.
The next project to make it to fruition was Butterflies and Lambs. The germ of inspiration was planted, somewhat traumatically, the day of our first performance at Hertfordshire University. On our way to lunch we piled into the lift. There were, not to put too fine a point on it, six crazy people and a drama therapist, when the lift dropped slightly, then stuck.
Obviously, we survived. To be honest we were never in any real danger, as Gerald helpfully pointed out that any actual peril wasn't the interesting bit; our reactions to it were, as were our reactions to the singularly unhelpful series of voices on the other end of the emergency intercom.
Initially we decided to explore these themes in the setting of a tube train that had stopped between stations. We had gained a new member but things, sadly, did not work out. When the work we had done on Nuts on a Train (working title) had to be shelved, we bit the bullet and committed ourselves to the idea of a performance taking place within the claustrophobic confines of a lift.
Once work had already started on the new piece we again gained a new member. This introduced an outsider element that challenged the inner realities of the trapped lift passengers, bringing the mental health themes more prominently to the fore. As with any new element to an established group, more than just the character is introduced. The impact on the individual and group dynamics catapults the drama to vivid new heights.
During 2013 we continued our work on what would become Butterflies and Lambs. In September we took Insidious Baggage to Roehampton University for the Drama Therapy students, and were overwhelmed by the appreciative reception.
In December we returned to Herts Uni with Insidious Baggage for the next cohort of clinical psychology students.
During the development of Butterflies, we were contacted by our now producer Nicola Williams who had worked with Gerald in her Drama Therapist training and thought that what we were doing was valuable. She wanted to help promote us and get us funding. She was enthusiastically accepted and began the laborious process of obtaining an Arts Council grant. She was mentored in this Herculean task by the wonderful Pippa Frith. An Independent Producer, Project Manager, Arts Administrator who has won the Peter Brook / Mark Marvin Rent Subsidy Award.
Nicola is also responsible for introducing us to Trestle. Based in St Albans with a focus on masks and physical theatre, this theatre company is housed in a refurbished, de-consecrated chapel from the site of one on London's large outlying Victorian Mental Asylums. In April 2014, we visited for the first time and saw Small Nose's scratch performance of Black Dog, based on the book about depression I Had a Black Dog, His Name Was Depression of the same name by Matthew Johnstone. We were also given a tour of the fantastic facilities at Trestle Art Base and hope of further collaboration bloomed furtively in our excited little hearts.
On May 27th 2014 our first performance of Butterflies and Lambs, to an invited audience at Colne House was well received and we were officially in Rep.
By July we gained another new member. We were now a company boasting a director, a producer and seven performers. Our newest member took over a previously voice only role from Gerald and made it her own.
The nine of us made May Contain Nuts' triumphant return to Roehampton, where we performed Butterflies and Lambs. Our reception was again warm and enthusiastic.
Our collaboration with Trestle started to sprout in August when we were invited to perform Butterflies and Lambs for them in their performance space. In September, we reinvested our fee from the Herts Uni 2013 gig into a mask workshop at Trestle. We enjoyed it immensely and gained skills and confidence from which we are still benefiting.
With funding seeming ever more imminent from Nicola’s dedicated and meticulous grant application, we had begun to think about our next project. We wanted something we could take into schools. Following feedback from tutors at Roehampton, we changed the focus from cyber bullying, to self-harm. We also experimented with the idea of a break from devised work and read half a dozen plays in the run up to Christmas 2014 until the Christmas break lent Gerald the time for a brain wave. As of now, we are working on a play set in the rehearsal process of a theatre company. We are working with excerpts of various texts to explore the themes of self-harm within our usual improvised framework.
We received confirmation of our Arts Council grant in February 2015 and are really looking forward to more workshops at Trestle and further collaborative opportunities with them and others.
As it happened, we were ready to show them the finished piece and performed it again the next week for our invited audience.
The response to both performances was beyond gratifying. The sense of having not just accomplished something that was in itself a difficult and complicated project, but that this project, our first baby, was worthwhile, significant and stood a chance of providing insight, raising awareness and reducing stigma... words really can't begin to do that feeling justice.
Not to labour the point, but before May Contain Nuts we had all been mentally ill and seriously struggling with our day to day lives. We were attending and benefiting from WA&TS but just leaving the house was still an issue for some of us. The thought of talking to strangers could induce panicked meltdown and depression and anxiety were never far enough away.
We'd love to say "we are all cured now!" but of course we're not. But we are better than we were. We still have times of crisis, ups and downs, good days, bad days and downright hellish days but this thing that we started just keeps getting stronger and we all want to stick around to see that happen, to make that happen. Which is pretty huge.
Over Christmas the long awaited move to Colne House on Upton Road finally happened and is currently home, as it has been since 2013.
The next project to make it to fruition was Butterflies and Lambs. The germ of inspiration was planted, somewhat traumatically, the day of our first performance at Hertfordshire University. On our way to lunch we piled into the lift. There were, not to put too fine a point on it, six crazy people and a drama therapist, when the lift dropped slightly, then stuck.
Obviously, we survived. To be honest we were never in any real danger, as Gerald helpfully pointed out that any actual peril wasn't the interesting bit; our reactions to it were, as were our reactions to the singularly unhelpful series of voices on the other end of the emergency intercom.
Initially we decided to explore these themes in the setting of a tube train that had stopped between stations. We had gained a new member but things, sadly, did not work out. When the work we had done on Nuts on a Train (working title) had to be shelved, we bit the bullet and committed ourselves to the idea of a performance taking place within the claustrophobic confines of a lift.
Once work had already started on the new piece we again gained a new member. This introduced an outsider element that challenged the inner realities of the trapped lift passengers, bringing the mental health themes more prominently to the fore. As with any new element to an established group, more than just the character is introduced. The impact on the individual and group dynamics catapults the drama to vivid new heights.
During 2013 we continued our work on what would become Butterflies and Lambs. In September we took Insidious Baggage to Roehampton University for the Drama Therapy students, and were overwhelmed by the appreciative reception.
In December we returned to Herts Uni with Insidious Baggage for the next cohort of clinical psychology students.
During the development of Butterflies, we were contacted by our now producer Nicola Williams who had worked with Gerald in her Drama Therapist training and thought that what we were doing was valuable. She wanted to help promote us and get us funding. She was enthusiastically accepted and began the laborious process of obtaining an Arts Council grant. She was mentored in this Herculean task by the wonderful Pippa Frith. An Independent Producer, Project Manager, Arts Administrator who has won the Peter Brook / Mark Marvin Rent Subsidy Award.
Nicola is also responsible for introducing us to Trestle. Based in St Albans with a focus on masks and physical theatre, this theatre company is housed in a refurbished, de-consecrated chapel from the site of one on London's large outlying Victorian Mental Asylums. In April 2014, we visited for the first time and saw Small Nose's scratch performance of Black Dog, based on the book about depression I Had a Black Dog, His Name Was Depression of the same name by Matthew Johnstone. We were also given a tour of the fantastic facilities at Trestle Art Base and hope of further collaboration bloomed furtively in our excited little hearts.
On May 27th 2014 our first performance of Butterflies and Lambs, to an invited audience at Colne House was well received and we were officially in Rep.
By July we gained another new member. We were now a company boasting a director, a producer and seven performers. Our newest member took over a previously voice only role from Gerald and made it her own.
The nine of us made May Contain Nuts' triumphant return to Roehampton, where we performed Butterflies and Lambs. Our reception was again warm and enthusiastic.
Our collaboration with Trestle started to sprout in August when we were invited to perform Butterflies and Lambs for them in their performance space. In September, we reinvested our fee from the Herts Uni 2013 gig into a mask workshop at Trestle. We enjoyed it immensely and gained skills and confidence from which we are still benefiting.
With funding seeming ever more imminent from Nicola’s dedicated and meticulous grant application, we had begun to think about our next project. We wanted something we could take into schools. Following feedback from tutors at Roehampton, we changed the focus from cyber bullying, to self-harm. We also experimented with the idea of a break from devised work and read half a dozen plays in the run up to Christmas 2014 until the Christmas break lent Gerald the time for a brain wave. As of now, we are working on a play set in the rehearsal process of a theatre company. We are working with excerpts of various texts to explore the themes of self-harm within our usual improvised framework.
We received confirmation of our Arts Council grant in February 2015 and are really looking forward to more workshops at Trestle and further collaborative opportunities with them and others.
