Clare Prenton
Image: Clare Prenton in rehearsals for Men Don’t Talk. Photograph by Mihaela Bodlovic.
Clare Prenton is a theatre writer and director who has worked with Alan Ayckbourn, Cumbernauld Theatre, and Pitlochry Festival Theatre. In recent years her work has increasingly focused on mental health themed projects.
Clare wrote her current show, Men Don’t Talk, in collaboration with a group of men from the Men’s Shed in Peebles; the show toured Scotland in October and November 2024 as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.
We interviewed Clare in December 2023 as we were developing our Performing Anxiety resource.
When did mental health become a focus of your work?
It’s been a sort of slow burner. I’ve personally always had an interest in it because my father had significant mental illness in his lifetime, so it’s something that I was attuned to from childhood. But the first kind of professional contact I had with mental health projects was when I was working for Perth Theatre, which is now known as Horsecross. When I first moved to Scotland I did a maternity cover post there between September 2003 and, I think, April May 2004, and part of my remit was that one day a week I would be working with adults with learning difficulties at Kinnoull Adult Resource Centre in Perth. The adults there had a range of learning difficulties from autism to Down’s Syndrome, between 18 right up to the age of 55 or 60.
And so I started to do work with them. My background was theatre and classical theatre and working with professional actors, so I tried to bring all that experience and, I suppose, my youth theatre experience. I had a lot of youth theatre experience at this point, in doing Shakespeare that was at an age appropriate or stage appropriate level for the group there. And we did some amazing work with them (Kinnoull Adult Resource Centre) because the man in charge of that group was very ambitious for them and we did all sorts of wonderful, wonderful work, including doing a version of Macbeth, and taking four adults with significant learning difficulty into Birnam forest to make a film that was then shown for the opening of Perth Concert Hall in 2005.
At the same time, I was working with PAMH (Perth Association for Mental Health). I chose to do a voice project with a group of adults with a mental health profile, and I wasn’t told what the mental health profile was, it was simply a group of adults who are experiencing mental health difficulties and were working with PAMH. We did radio work, created radio plays, and tried to build confidence through the voice. So again, it was just about using my skills from theatre, and moulding the course around the group of individuals sitting in front of you. So you plan it, but then when you meet the group that’s when the real fine tuning happens really.
And then I didn’t really do much more until more recent times here at the Eastgate Theatre in Peebles where they had an outreach department at that time, and so money would come for artists to work with people in the community. And it might be craft, dance, or drama, and so there were two or three projects that I did that were funded by Eastgate Theatre. One was called The Memory Jar, and I went into residential homes, and used music and conversation, what I call spirited conversation, to engage the residents in talking about what the music meant for them, and memories from the past. And then from that I wrote monologues for professional actors to perform back to the residents. So we’re taking their stories and then mirroring them back to them through drama. There was always a little bit of artistic licence within that. Sometimes it was verbatim, sometimes they had given me an idea and I would run with that and explain that I took this idea from what you said. But all the participants knew exactly where that material had come from because they had been in the room when that was happening. And that was performed at the Eastgate Theatre and the participants were invited to come and have tea and cake and watch the professional actors, script in hand, reading those pieces back to them.
So that worked really, really well. And where Men Don’t Talk sort of happened is that I had been doing that kind of work in community for the theatre, and some money came from a charity called Inspiring Life, the Evie Douglas Memorial Fund. Evie had worked as an assistant for my Let’s Pretend drama classes; she was a talented dancer who took her own life at 21. She had taught my daughter tap dancing when my daughter was eight. Evie’s been gone nine years and in that time her mum set up this charity, and she has depressed cake stalls to fundraise. The underpinning kind of ethos of this charity is we raise money and we give it back to artists to create work with the community. And the underpinning kind of philosophy is that the arts can help mental health and mental well-being.
Men Don’t Talk is based on group sessions where you talk to men about mental health. Can you talk about how you turned this material into a piece of theatre?
I recorded all the sessions, there were four 90-minute sessions. I didn’t transcribe them, because I didn’t want to type it all out, because there was so much chat, but I listened to them a lot. And then from that, as I started to write a play about three men, I drew from the ten men that took part. I was using some verbatim, and some was me creating characters. The men afterwards said that they knew exactly where every bit that had been verbatim had come from, but what they couldn’t believe was how I’d put those into three people from 10 people. Nobody was credited with specific bits, so anyone coming to see it wouldn’t know who said what. And I don’t want them to know that because I think the men trusted me so were coming out with all sorts of things, just between everyone who was in the room. But I do say that they were co-contributors of the work, because I couldn’t have written it without their contributions. They’ll say, ‘we’re not writers.’ And I’ll say, ‘well, actually, you are, because you are co-contributing by having these conversations with me. And then I go away and sort of have a creative idea about it. But some of the phrasing and some of the things they come out with are so beautiful, it is writing actually, the way people speak. And so you don’t want to tinker with that too much. You want to keep the essence of that. So it’s a delicate balance. I do feel that responsibility quite heavily. They always checked the drafts, and I would send that back to them for feedback. And we would make changes based on that.
What kinds of things did you have to consider when setting up the meetings with the men?
I knew I was walking into a space where some of the men might be a bit hesitant about talking to me, not the men that had signed up but the men that were also in the shed that I was engaging with. Broadly, I had the support of it. But also there were issues of alcoholism, addiction, grief, people who’d lost their wives, prostate cancer. So there were a range of topics that I knew, not that I couldn’t go there, but I just wanted to be sensitive to those things.
When you walk into the Peebles Men’s Shed, and I’m sure every shed is like this, it’s a very special atmosphere, I describe it a bit like the TARDIS, because once you’re in, it’s really hard to leave it. Because there’s so many personalities, and there’s so much banter, and there’s so much warmth, that, you know, you’re always late leaving. I wanted to capture that in the play; for me, the most important thing was to try and capture this kind of camaraderie and this very gentle humour, which might be a Borders thing, you know. If I’d written the play with three Glasgow guys, the humour might have been much more robust, like it is in Liverpool where I’m from. But in the Borders, people have a very gentle sort of humour, and it’s very dry. And so it was trying to capture some of that, really.
How did you explain what you were setting out to do?
Really, really clearly. That we were going to have four workshops, that we were going to cover a range of topics that I had decided but weren’t fixed in stone. So if conversations kind of exploded in one particular area, then I’d respond to that the following week.
And what were those topics?
We started with, ‘Why do you come here? What do you get out of it? Why are you here?’ And actually, those very open questions led very quickly to a range of topics that I had not anticipated discussing. So, for example, retirement anxiety came up really quickly. That was a real thing for quite a few of the men that, as they were reaching retirement age, colleagues were either dying or had retired and dropped down dead the next day. Malcolm who ran the group was telling me that his brother missed his own retirement due because he’d had a heart attack. So this has given him a real existential fear of retirement, not just ‘What am I going to do with myself, am I going to go gardening or do some voluntary work?’ but actually ‘Am I going to be here?’
That was something that, age 48 or whatever I was then, I had not anticipated they would be thinking about, and so that was fascinating to go down that route. There was a lot of grief and talking about the women in their lives. And so the play has no women in it but for me the women are really present. Because again, what I took from it was that all of these men had families and everything they talked about axis-ed off a woman in their life, whether that was a divorce or, in one case, a coercive, controlling situation that he’d managed to kind of come out of, he was very open about that.
Then the conversation started to mould around these men, as opposed to generic questions. And I’m quite happy to do that dance because I’m used to starting with a blank page as a writer and as a devisor of work. That kind of approach does not frighten me at all. In fact, I prefer it. But that’s just because I’ve got a lot of experience in facilitating these sorts of things, whereas someone else with a blank page would be really terrified. But I think the theatre were really keen that I did have a blank page. So those open questions started us off, then cake and tea, and a sense of humour, and just making myself as unthreatening as possible in terms of reassuring them that they were not going to act, they were not going to perform in front of anybody. anything they said was completely confidential within those walls. Those reassurances were really key to mention in week one, but to reiterate, you know, as we went through and so they were so trusting of me that I became an honorary shedder at this point. And they really just came out with things I just did not anticipate that they would and that was beautiful because my gut feeling was that men do talk, of course, given the right circumstances, and given the time and space to do so.
I come from a family where the men never shut up. Whether that’s because they have so many women around them, I don’t know, but Scouse men are not known for being quiet either. But it was lovely that we always ran over, I could have done two hours actually, we always ran over and I absolutely had that maximum trust to the point where they were just coming out with all sorts. And then we got a very beautifully told story about a very traumatic event in Northern Ireland when one of the men was working as a soldier in Ireland during the Troubles. And so that is the most verbatim sort of moment in the play. And it seemed really important to me that, you know, we’ve got characters with addiction, but there’s always a reason for these things, you know, so one character is a widow, and another one is a carer looking after his wife, who’s fading and has dementia. And one is divorced and isolated from his children because of his addiction issues. So I kind of followed some of the issues that the men had highlighted and then made fictional characters from those things. But in each story, I wanted the audience to see how that had happened, and to have maximum sympathy for these three characters, that they are all in a place now because of their histories and where life had had taken them.
The show has been praised as raising awareness of the importance of Men’s Sheds as a suicide prevention and mental wellbeing movement. Was suicide prevention a subject you set out to explore, or did that emerge through the process?
It’s there really because we were funded by the initial funding came from a suicide prevention charity and it’s very clear on what its aims are. It’s not explicitly there, but there is one character who certainly would be at risk of that. He talks about Alcoholics Anonymous, and the joke is kind of that he used to always be in the pub, and he tells the guys in the pub – because it starts with him sitting in a pub, and he’s drinking a pint of orange juice – you know, when I’m not here, I’m there. And when I’m not there, I’m in Alcoholics Anonymous now. So his friends are teasing him. Why don’t we see you anymore? Because all he does is talk, talk, talk now. He’s like a granny on amphetamine, he says, because he never stops talking. And you know that he’s found this talking therapy and it’s working for him, that camaraderie and that comfort, but again, that’s because he’s lost his entire family due to addiction, and he’s lost his wife, and he has no contact with his grown up boys. And that’s devastating for him. So he has a friendship with one of the other men who’s lost his wife, and they fill these gaps for each other as best they can, in terms of companionship, I suppose. And just, what is the reason for getting out of bed every day, for people that have that sort of social isolation?
Did the knowledge that it was going to be fictionalised help the participants open up more?
Yeah, I would hope. You sort of see the shoulders go down, when you start one of those groups, and you start explaining that no one’s going to ask you to perform, no one’s going to know that it was attributed to you. For me that’s really important, creating that safe space. I mean, that’s what I would do with any drama workshop anyway, actually, because you’re asking people to give a lot of themselves in front of people they don’t necessarily know that well, and come up with stories that they’ve perhaps never told before in the Shed.
What kinds of things do you need to consider when touring a show like this?
The (Creative Scotland) application was really clear that we wanted to attach workshops to meet our audiences, either before the performance or after. And every time we’ve done it, as a reading, we have always had a feedback session at the end for people to say what they think, and there’s always been tea and biscuits and cake either before or after, to kind of recreate the spirit of the shed I suppose.
Interestingly, the feedback’s been about all sorts of things, often from women, saying it opened up conversations about things that he won’t talk about. And actually in the Men’s Shed, some of the women said to me, ‘I’m only here because I signed up to try and get my husband to come, I didn’t really want to come myself but he wouldn’t go anywhere.’ I never mentioned that to the men, obviously. But you know, there was this kind of sleight of hand thing going on where the reason why some women join Men’s Sheds is just to get the man through the door. So these workshops are going to be quite key, and they will be facilitated by someone who is a trained facilitator for wellbeing and they will probably mimic what I did in the shed in Peebles initially to open up fresh conversations with groups of men about, you know, do they attend a shed and what do they get from it, and to kind of explore the themes of the play. And just see what new themes might emerge from that as well.
What would you say to somebody who wants to make a piece of theatre about mental health?
I think I’d want to see even just a simple A4 draft of what their intention is, and the why of it. I’d want to know that it was coming from the right place, and that it knew what it was doing. It needs to be specific, I think, like anything, any planning that is good, I think it needs to have a really specific target and know what it’s trying to do, and not try to do too much either, just to be measurable, evaluated, and well thought out, and well run.
With the Men’s Shed, they’re all men over 18, they’re all men with good mental health in the sense that they can get themselves to the shed every day. I think if I was working with a more vulnerable group, then it might be quite useful to have an NHS clinical psychologist or someone who’s overseeing the project and advising in that regard.
I’m about to start work with Andy’s Man Club. This was a charity that was set up a few years ago when a young man called Andy took his own life sort of out of the blue and his family were absolutely blindsided by it. He was 23 years of age and his brother in law felt he had to do something. So they set up these talking groups on a Monday night from seven till nine. And it has mushroomed right across the UK and it’s in Scotland now. I had a quick look to see where my local one was, and there’s one in Galashiels, and there’s quite a few in Edinburgh, and they’d like to go into Hawick, and I’ve been doing work down in Hawick, so I’m at the moment I’ve just got £2000 to start a project with Andy’s Man Club and I’m going to use the Men Don’t Talk model. The play will be even less realistic, there’s going to be an angel character in it, I think. And it may be more kind of rock and roll and have live music and microphones, it’s going to be a very different beast. But it will be using exactly the same techniques for drilling down into the issues and trying to powerfully put them on stage. And I will call it the title (Andy’s Man Club) because I want to promote that charity, and the work that it’s doing is amazing.
So creating artistic work about things that people understand and care about and affects all of us is very exciting for me, but it’s also putting things on stage that I haven’t seen on stage. And so it’s exciting artistically, but there’s a social benefit which is just personally very rewarding as well, and I suppose is educating people. I’m a trained teacher as well, so I’m wanting to educate people about these things because my own father didn’t have that toolbox in his own lifetime to talk to people. He just couldn’t do it. And he wouldn’t join groups.
And so if we can change that conversation for the generations to come, you know, then then I think that’s a brilliant thing because it dominated every aspect of our family life. It’s the rest of the family that’s affected as well and I think people don’t often realise that.
Performing Anxiety
A resource for people who want to make audience-facing or participatory arts projects about mental health.
