Ten Years of Roundabout

Ten years ago we launched Roundabout, the world’s first flat pack theatre, together with Paines Plough. To mark the anniversary we’ve commissioned a new article by writer, interviewer and documentary-maker Jude Rogers, looking back on the story of the venue – from an initial sketch on the back of a receipt to its role in developing some of the UK’s finest new writers. 

Magic only needs two people, an Allen key and a mallet – although if you have six human beings, that magic can be built in a day and a half. From these few human beings, from these simple tools, a theatre can be erected, anywhere: ready to share the stories bubbling within it. 

This is how Roundabout, Paines Plough’s pop-up, plug-in-and-play theatre, has worked wonders in its first decade, appearing on council estates, market squares, sports grounds and seafronts. Taking new writing across the UK, it has transformed the potential of what theatre can do and, crucially, where it can go. 

Roundabout is about sharing stories and letting them travel, but it has its own story, too: one that began in 2010 with a desperation to take plays to places which didn’t have their own theatres. This story gained shape in a doodle on a restaurant receipt, a plot when obstacles had to be battled and funding had to be raised, and structure when lighting and sound rigs had to be literally reinvented. 

This story also required a cast of lively characters who wouldn’t believe anything was impossible. Or as one of Roundabout’s co-creators, James Grieve, explains a little more bluntly: “You needed to be certifiably insane to embark upon this project.” 

The Dream

One lunchtime in July, the original trio behind Roundabout are together again on Zoom. James Grieve MBE is now the award-winning director of huge musicals like Fisherman’s Friends: The Musical and Berlusconi: A New Musical, and lives in South London. George Perrin MBE is now a creative life coach living in Kent. Lucy Osborne is in Gothenburg where she runs studio three sixty, a multi-disciplinary practice that works with performing arts venues to activate and regenerate buildings. 

Back in 2010, James and George were co-directors of Paines Plough, the celebrated new writing touring theatre company, but they’d been friends since their university days together in Sheffield. Both were driven by the desire to take plays to places that didn’t have theatres, James specifically by growing up in Folkestone, “a proper cultural wasteland in the 1980s and the 1990s without any venues at all,” he says with a grimace. 

Their dream was a venue where plays could be staged in the same way every time, with the same repertory company, offering the same experience for everyone – and they’d been a determined pair from the start of their adventures together in theatre. They set up a company, nabokov (“with no money”, says James), ran ambitious projects (“on three credit cards,” adds George, “with me living with my parents, working three jobs”), and used peculiar methods for securing stage sets for fringe shows (begged and borrowed half-finished kitchen units from shops and dumped white goods they’d found on late-night drives around towns in borrowed cars). 

“I think that approach sums up the vibe with Roundabout from the outset,” George says. But whenever they did a project on a shoestring, James and George didn’t just want to make it happen: they wanted Roundabout to be “top dollar,” smart and professional. They brought in Lucy, a theatre designer from Sheffield with whom James had worked in 2008, on a Bush theatre production of Mike Bartlett’s play, Artefacts, where artistic director Josie Rourke allowed them – Lucy smiles as James relays this memory – to rip out the seats. “We got a buzz from transforming a space architecturally, not just in terms of theatre design, but physically remoulding it.” 

They didn’t have expertise or knowledge in creating theatres, Lucy adds, but, perversely, she thinks that this helped the Roundabout project along. “We had no clue what we were doing and I mean that in the best possible way. We didn’t know what we were getting into, but we trusted each other because we’d worked together in other contexts. It felt like an extension of both creating work together and making this big idea work for new writers.” 

The Initial Sketches

Lucy was the person to whom George passed over the doodle on a restaurant receipt, featuring one sketch of a theatre that looked a little like a doughnut, and another featuring a stick person in the middle of a circular floor. “And on day one, when that doodle was drawn, that was the point of no return,” George says. “I didn’t think it was ever not happening.”  

Many people told James, George and Lucy that Roundabout wouldn’t work; how other people had tried similar projects in the past that had failed; and that issues that they couldn’t possibly have thought about would hamper their plans. Thankfully and miraculously, the trio’s idealism, bloody-mindedness, and determination won through. 

Creating the Prototype

Lucy made sketches and computer visualisations before a Roundabout prototype was built in collaboration with Sheffield Theatres in 2011, costing £25,000, which was installed in the city’s Crucible studio. James and George wrote an article for the Guardian about it at the time that revealed their wider ambitions – their plans for Roundabout to be like “a miniature Coliseum, or Barcelona’s Camp Nou” (James is still fascinated by how more people willingly watch sports, and how similar spaces could help people watch plays, which his podcast, Game/Show, explores in lively detail). 

But back then, theatre architecture was moving towards flexible, multi-purpose spaces – they quoted playwright Simon Stephens to explain their commitment to the theatre in the round, “as there’s no theatrical architecture that challenges or interrogates what it is to be a human being more”. The seats in Roundabout would also be steeply raked, allowing each person to have the best seat in the house. Above all, they were committed to dismantling the formal idea of theatre, with its proscenium arch, heavy curtain at the front, expensive seats trailing back to the cheap seats, and the idea of people having to be quiet in the dark. 

“All that’s got this weight, which we wanted to kick against,” James says. “We also wanted to invite people who had never been to the theatre before, and have a space that would give them that wow factor.” 

Taking Shape

Roundabout version 1 was revealed to the world in October 2011, and a repertory of three new plays was co-produced in the Crucible space over the next six weeks (One Day When We Were Young by Nick Payne, Lungs by Duncan Macmillan and The Sound of Heavy Rain by Penelope Skinner). Exeunt said the theatre was “an impressive achievement, bringing the audience incredibly close to a tiny stage…[it] means that not a facial expression can be wasted.” The Guardian’s then-theatre critic Lyn Gardner called it “an enticingly intimate space, which serves to magnify the plays’ themes rather than cramp them.” 

A year later, Roundabout upped camp to Shoreditch Town Hall, where major problems started to hit. The team realised how much they had relied on the lighting and sound rig back in Sheffield, so their production manager Bernd Fauler sent the team back to the drawing board. “Bernd was our sense checker, with a brilliant, slight sense of world-weariness, which was quite helpful,” Lucy says with a smile. “But he was also from a fine art background, and very practical. He gets behind a vision in a really beautiful way.” These were the minds the project would need to succeed. 

Funding for the project’s spiralling costs was also of constant concern. At one crucial meeting that could have sunk Roundabout without a positive result, Lucy had to bring her toddler along. Thankfully, they got the money they needed. “James has always said my son won it for us,” Lucy says. 

Essential too was Caro Newling, co-founder of the Donmar Warehouse and now the director of Neal Street Productions and Chair of the Board at Paines Plough. “She was the team’s tireless strategist, advocate, campaigner and fundraiser,” James explains, “instrumental in making the Roundabout dream a reality”. Tara Wilkinson, then a producer at Paines Plough, and now Executive Director at Tall Stories after work at Underbelly, The Old Vic and the Almeida, was another vital cog. “She is a bundle of the energy and joy and borderline madness which the best producers have – someone who could pick up the phone and call somebody who could then call somebody else who could donate some money or solve a problem”. 

Technical Innovations and Collaborations

However, physical infrastructure challenges continued to threaten the project entirely. Roundabout required a lighting and sound rig to be portable, flexible and light, to allow audiences everywhere the same theatre experience. Lucy brought in lighting designer Emma Chapman, who loved the benevolent spirit behind the project. “The idea of making plays accessible to people who wouldn’t want to go to a traditional theatre made me really want to do it,” she says over a separate Zoom call between shows. “And I wanted to help make the architecture intriguing, a bit like a spaceship which has just landed, that people are willing to have a look in.” 

She had an idea for the lights she’d like to use, but knew she needed some innovative technology to make it happen – so she called in theatre industry legend Howard Eaton as a collaborator. His company designed the flaming rings for the 2012 London Olympics ceremony and the astonishing flying car for the 2000s West End production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Bang. “Howard’s extraordinary,” she says. “He’s kind of a mad inventor, but he’s also got a heart of gold – one of those people who will find a way to make something possible if somebody says it’s not possible.” 

“They were a likeable bunch,” Howard a few days later, on the phone, of his first meeting with Emma and the Roundabout team.“And it felt like a foolish challenge, but I’m an idiot, so I did it anyway!” 

Emma and Howard spent time researching how lighting worked in very different places, doing complex maths to work out angles, and considering how software could help. They created nine triangular panels of ambient light that could be winched up from head height to the ceiling, the triangles all pointing to the centre, to direct the audience’s eyes to the performance space. 

The lights weren’t conventional bulbs, though, as these would be too heavy. Instead, Howard invented a brand new kind of LED to replicate the capabilities of a theatre lantern in its range of colour, warmth, intensity and direction (Roundabout has 627 individual light fittings in total). “And because of the complexity of the pixels, you could write letters, or you could run clouds over the top of the stage,” Emma adds. “Even more creative possibilities were opened up by what he did.” 

Howard remembers the team’s naivety. “They didn’t quite know what they’d got themselves into. But I’ve learned not to do what people say, but to work out what they want, so I carried on and thought, ‘I’m going to build it anyway.’ What drove him on wasn’t the technical challenge either, he says, but the space’s potential for new writing.

“If no one’s writing new plays, then theatre will collapse. New writing is absolutely at the heart of this industry. We have to support it, and Roundabout enabled people to stage a lot of it in a fabulous environment. It’s really unique.” 

Edinburgh and Beyond

After further work with acoustician Paul Gillieron and leading theatre consultants Charcoalblue, Roundabout was finally unveiled at the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. As the centrepiece of Paines Plough’s 40th anniversary, it sat in a marquee – the yellow geodesic dome it is now housed in would come later – and with the help of Northern Stage and Summerhall, it became a fringe venue for a month, a tradition which has continued to this day. 

Roundabout hosted ten performances a day in Edinburgh that first summer, including four Paines Plough premieres. In its first year, it also travelled to Newbury, Margate, Barnsley and Hackney. It has since gone even further afield, including a football pitch in Coventry, a market square in Doncaster, the side of a lake in the Lake District and a campus in Lincoln. 

A New Space for New Voices

While journeying around the UK, Roundabout also became a hothouse for future theatre pioneers like Hanna Streeter, now the Executive Director of the Orange Tree Theatre (who began at Paines Plough as an administrator, before rising to be a Senior Producer). Then there was Francesca Moody, an assistant producer at Paines Plough around the time of Roundabout’s launch in 2014. A few years later she produced the original stage production of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag before it became an international TV phenomenon – but her years at Roundabout were pivotal to her understanding of storytelling, she says, and how it serves people. 

Over Zoom in the run-up to Edinburgh, she talks enthusiastically about the audience development work at Roundabout, and her time meeting with touring partners across the country. “It was important to know the people who worked at venues, as well as people in the local community. We didn’t want to just parachute into a place, but actually allow the local community to take ownership of our theatre and have agency in the programming of the space.” 

Roundabout felt like a brilliantly democratic space to develop and experience theatre from day one, she adds. “When you’re in Roundabout, you can see people everywhere, and there’s a real sense of communion with the rest of the audience. That can be quite magical, and add another layer to your experience.” It helped that its name quickly became associated with an expectation of a level of work, too. “Roundabout became a beacon of quality and playfulness – and it still is”. 

She enjoyed watching it flourish. She remembers watching Duncan MacMillan’s Lungs at the beginning of one run with only four other people before it played to full houses at the end of it. This was a play many theatres had rejected – one that eventually ended up on stage at the Old Vic in 2019, starring Matt Smith and Claire Foy. 

Roundabout was also the first place to stage Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer in 2019, and early runs for Sam Steiner’s Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, plus work by Charley Miles, Nilaja Sun, Georgia Christou and Vinay Patel. Last year, Lyn Gardner wrote in Stagedoor that Roundabout had been “as important for British new writing as the Royal Court or the Bush.” 

It’s a theatre that’s come a long way from the back of a restaurant receipt. 

Tour posters from early productions at Roundabout

Thinking Big and Thinking Differently

Francesca still adores Roundabout – but it often makes her think. “It’s my favourite theatre in the world, it really is. But when you step back from it and look at it, you think, excuse my French, but how the fuck did it happen? How did James and George come up with that idea? How did Lucy and Emma make that into a reality? And how did Howard do that? How did everyone deliver all of those incomprehensible things?” 

“It was one of the best projects I’ve ever worked on,” says Emma. “And the biggest thing about it was that it was a meeting of so many minds, with lots of big ideas.” Lucy also loves how Roundabout quickly took on its own life: “because we conceived it as being quite a specific space which would work in a certain way. But quickly people started doing things in Roundabout that we never imagined they were going to do, or we even allowed for.” 

This might be because of the audaciousness James and George injected into the project in the first place. “The idea that we’re just going to find a way, you know – let’s just do or die. We’ll invent the technology if it doesn’t exist. That’s very inspiring, isn’t it?” 

In its tenth anniversary year, Roundabout reminds us of the power of connecting people in hugely ambitious, creative and, crucially, new ways. “To me, Roundabout’s about new models of working, challenging the status quo,” George says. “It’s about thinking big and thinking differently. And in some ways, the community model for Roundabout was well ahead of its time – it was trying to take the theatre to people, for them to use it from the ground up. I’d love to think that Roundabout is an invitation and an inspiration to people to do just that. ”

James would similarly like the success of Roundabout to galvanise people. “Particularly the decision-makers in power and funding bodies to look at the infrastructure across the country and ensure that everybody, everywhere, has access to culture. We need to think 

about seeing a play, enjoying live music, experiencing great storytelling, and it being in our community as an essential human right. Nowhere should be without it.” 

Roundabout also reminds us to look at each other in the eye across the playing field of creativity, and keep telling more stories loudly and proudly, against the odds – that this way of thinking and acting is for all of us, wherever we live, however we live, whoever we are. Magic can be built by any of us, from the simplest tools, and our wildest dreams.

About the Author

Jude Rogers is a writer, interviewer and documentary-maker. Known for her arts and culture journalism for The Guardian, the Observer and BBC radios, her 2022 memoir, The Sound Of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives, was shortlisted for Welsh Book Of The Year and the Penderyn Music Prize.

Follow Jude on Instagram and Twitter