Hello, I'm Tim Evans and I run The Factory with
Alex Hassell and Liam Evans-Ford.
In 2005 I created a theatre company, and produced a couple of shows.
After a year, I realised I couldn't do this alone, and in fact I wasn't serving myself fully as an actor.
It was around this time that Alex and I found ourselves in that very common place: out-of-work, pissed-off, fed-up and seemingly powerless to do anything about it.
So we did something about it.
We realised that outside the oases of employment, there were no real, ongoing, and consistent opportunities to engage in our art, unless you had lots of money to keep forking out for variable-quality and extortionate classes or weekends.
For better or worse, we have found ourselves in the most inter-dependent of art-forms and yet all too often find ourselves wholly dependent on the agent who will or will not phone. This sole factor dictates whether we engage in our craft.
I kept thinking of Imelda Staunton when she came to talk to us one afternoon, when training at drama school. She said she learnt how to be an actor from years and years of working in the repertory system. There, you were part of a group, sharing, learning, growing, exploring, but most importantly, JUST DOING what actors and directors and designers were supposed to do; week in, week out, year after year.
It was social, communal and inter-dependent.
Of course, I'm aware that it could also be staid, trite and at times bad theatre, and I am not talking here about whether it was the best over-all system or not. But what I am aware of is of the important, if not essential role it played in nurturing, teaching and incubating great theatrical talent, over a period of time that is no longer available to artists on today's conveyor-belt of commercials; TV; Film; and cash-strapped theatre productions.
Alex and I both realised that there was nothing that was providing what we and every actor and director that we spoke to over the coming months wanted.
The birth of The Factory was on a cold January night in 2007.
Al and I had contacted the actors and directors we liked, thought / knew were good, and said "Come along. We're just going to play about every week, and see what happens" - a bunch of friends and colleagues meeting up and exploring, learning, and sharing knowledge and skills....keeping creatively fit and healthy. A place that consciously barred all the politics and ******** that the industry can be awash with all too often, and where the creation of interesting work could be tried, allowed to flourish and succeed, or equally importantly to fail.
Based on the incredible response to The Factory and its work, we hope we have gone some way to doing that.
