FRANTIC ASSEMBLY

Frantic Assembly are a vastly known theatre company, which formed over twenty five years ago. It is located within London. The co-owner Scott Graham founded this company in 1994.  They have created many pieces of work, including but not limited to: I Think We Are Alone, Othello, Beautiful Burnout, Things I Know To Be True and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. They have collaborated and commissioned with a rage of writers, such as: Sally Abbott, Simon Stephens, Andrew Bovell, Mark Ravenhill and Bryony Lavery- they have even toured the work with their productions- visiting approximately 40 countries. Their company is best known for their work with physical theatre, they include it within their productions perpetually. But saying that, you might be wondering what physical theatre ACTUALLY is. Physical theatre is a rather abstract tool for performing- it is the primary method of story telling with physical movement. It incoperates techniques such as: mime, gesture and even modern dance. Physical theatre will generally have little to no dialogue as the main focus is the movement and physicality. Frantic Assembly develop physical theatre in their own individual style to tell a story. I myself did take part in physical theatre back when I did GCSE drama. Our teachers gave us a song as a stimulus and then we had to devise our piece in pairs or trios- we used chairs as props and did some weird mimey dance thing. Frantic Assembly actually post videos on their Youtube about physical theatre, including masterclasses. 

To gather more knowledge of physical theatre and Frantic Assembly, I watched ‘I Think We Are Alone’ which was written by Sally Abbott and co-directed by Kathy Burke and Scott Graham. It tells a story of two sisters who are in conflict and are bickering over text; they are aggressive with their language and it’s pushing their relationship further away when their deepest desire is to meet, clear the air and talk about their past events when they were young girls. Which is still haunting them. It is described as a ‘bittersweet and funny take on our ache to connect with those voices we need to hear again’ and I couldn’t agree more. I would describe this as a sort of coming of age performance that is raw and emotional. One thing that left me speechless was when they used these sort of barries, and people where stood behind them and it blurred them out, so they where merely a silhouette. It really emphasised the purpose of the scenes and exemplified the emotions. It talked about a lot of relevant and real issues of today which I think was really healing in a sense and made you feel seen. It was absolutely amazing and the actors performed flawlessly. Here are some quotes from an audience which watched the show: “I’m just, kind of, speechless. It was absolutely amazing”, “It took me back to some very emotional times in my life”, “I’ve never seen anything quite like this before”, “It made me think a lot about the things we hold onto in life and the things we could maybe do with letting go of to move forward”. This show very clearly connected with the audience and was very eye opening to watch, and not only did it connect to that audience, it also connected to me.