Lucy Morrison may be best known for her work as Head of Artistic Programme at groundbreaking theatre company Clean Break, but she's also currently artistic associate at The Almeida where she's put together a fantastically ambitious festival programme; small scale work with very big ideas. We chatted to Lucy about some of those ideas and the effect theatre can have on people's lives.

RR: The Almeida Festival 2013 features some of our favourite performers; Bryony Kimmings' new work sees her creating a credible role model with the help of her 9 year old niece- this seems like a great example of theatre and performance effecting people's 'real lives'- obviously an aim with your work at Clean Break. Have you consciously tried to bring this objective into the Almeida Festival?

Bryony Kimmings as Catherine Bennett

LM: I didn’t consciously do it, but I guess the programming reflects my passions and obsessions. I am a secret theatre hippy – I really do believe that theatre has the power to affect lives. Bryony read out her manifesto for the creation of Catherine Bennett over Skype to me and I hardly let her finish her sentence before I was offering her a slot in the Festival. What she was saying about the lack of role models for young women really chimed with a lot that I had already been thinking about. The messaging for girls in this country is so skewed – they are supposed to work really hard at school, but grasping at real examples of female role models in media and fiction as to what and who they might aspire to be beyond that is distinctly lacking. I have a nine year old daughter and the other day she was looking to buy her best friend a book about survival, which they are both really interested in. She wanted something aimed at children – she found ‘The Survival Book for Boys’, which was about having adventures in the wild, then she found ‘The Survival Book for Girls’, but this one was about the emotional journey of surviving puberty. I think this felt like a tiny message to her – that she shouldn’t be thinking along those lines. It feels trivial taken by itself, but those messages are everywhere and start to pile up. I think Bryony is the perfect artist to start a conversation about this – she is massively charismatic and extremely clever at animating debates through her work, which are both artistically and socially exciting. 

Made in China: Gym Party

RR: Made In China have received rave reviews- what makes Gym Party such a great show?

LM: What I love about Made In China is their playful accessible approach coupled with a deeply serious intent. Gym Party will be great because it combines relatable teenage tales of awkward and painful failures, lessons or even successes; being gazumped on your anticipated first kiss by your best friend, being ejected from your clique, having to run the 400 metres and being embarrassed by actually being good at it- with fluent, angry commentary on the way Britain is being run and the way Britons are being told to think in 2013. The combination of these things, along with the physical spectacle of three people genuinely competing in 3 different rounds of contests, will make the show fun and powerful. They tell me that they also have a purpose-built shrine to Hollywood wannabe-A-Lister Taylor Kitsch - the patron saint of the Church of the Self, which the show claims to be. And it's full of bad-but-good 80s and 90s classics as soundtrack to the show. And the contestants - zealous members of the Church of Self - have theme songs. And garish wigs. AND there's going to be a daring stunt at the end of the show... what more could you want?

Big Hits: GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN

RR: GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN's show Big Hits has been described as 'groundbreaking'- what ground is there left to 'break' in theatre?

LM: I don’t think anyone sets out to ‘break ground’. This is true of GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN and all the other companies in the Festival – they make the work because they don't see it being made anywhere else in quite the way they’d like to see it. They want to see it, so they have to make it. GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN, rather than doing things that have never been done on stage before, they mix elements in what's perceived as a 'new' way - doing things in contexts that feel new. I asked GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN’s Artistic Director Hester Chillingworth about this and she said; “In terms of what ground is there left to break, theatre is still often a passive experience for the spectator and a vain experience for the performer – GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN believe that ground still needs to be churned up and some honesty needs to come out about it. We don't use 'theatre' as a label for our work because it's at the intersection between a lot of different modes of performance - theatre which says it's just theatre would for us already be caught inside something sedate, which needs to be broken. Or which we would feel the need to break.”

RR: How do you think we can encourage more people to go to the theatre?

LM: Keep the prices affordable and those that can afford tickets at the high-end, subsidise tickets for those who can’t. Theatre makers should not get too complacent; keep the form evolving, so a night at the theatre is as exciting as and fresh as seeing the hottest new band. Don’t let the industry suffocate talent and ideas by playing safe with, what I call, heritage programming; we need to look forward. Break down formalities of theatres from the way we communicate the work to how welcome audiences are made to feel; make everyone who takes the trouble to come to a theatre, feel like theatre is for them. It’s obvious, I have said it before and I will say it again - we have to keep working towards artistic leadership that better represents our cultural and ethnic make-up. There are massively untapped audiences out there and we need to get over the message that theatre is not for the privileged few, by making work that speaks to peoples’ real concerns whilst entertaining them and making them think.

RR: Tell us about the work Clean Break does.

LM: Clean Break is a theatre company founded by two women prisoners over thirty years ago; our artistic mission is to create bold new plays by the best women playwrights; making powerful theatre stories about women and crime. We take this work into prisons and onto stages across the UK, and beyond. At our London studios we also run a bespoke drama-based education programme for women ex-offenders and women at risk. The company’s long-term vision is of a society where women are not criminalised unjustly nor imprisoned unnecessarily.

RR: I think of myself as an active feminist, but I was shocked to read on your site that first-time women offenders are twice as likely as men to be sent to prison- I had no idea this was the case. Why do we hear so little about what seems to be a glaring example of inequality ?

LM: Gender inequalities are expressed more keenly down at the lower end of the economic scale and this is not a sexy news story. It’s a good question, but a difficult one. Men are over-represented in sentencing in senior positions particularly, so being more transparent about decisions would involve some unpacking - highlighting and ultimately admitting that there is a basic inequality there, would shine a light on the fact that the system designed by men for men, does not adequately meet women's needs. Asking those questions would mostly be in the interests of women who are at the bottom end of society and it’s a pretty sobering thought, but they don’t carry enough economic or political weight to make change necessary. At the crux of it, is the fact that women who commit crimes are more harshly judged by society than men. I think we have a prurient fascination with women who do, but ultimately it’s seen as something that goes against the natural order.

The Almeida Festival runs until 9th August, see the programme and book tickets here.