How cutting-edge drama Rock / Paper / Scissors makes theatre 3D

When I arrive at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, one of the main doors is out of action — a simple fault that is easily fixed by a maintenance man with a toolbox. Yet this is exactly the sort of minor mishap that currently haunts the creative team behind the new production Rock / Paper / Scissors.

In this wildly ambitious trilogy, written by Sheffield-born playwright Chris Bush to celebrate the theatre’s 50th anniversary, three interrelated plays will run simultaneously across all three spaces of Sheffield Theatres — the Crucible, Lyceum and Studio. A single company of 14 actors will perform all three, with the cast sprinting between the stages mid-scene. Every entrance is timed down to the second — one broken door and the whole project could grind to a halt.

“We wanted to do something that felt like an event,” says artistic director Robert Hastie when I meet the three directors (Hastie directs Paper) and playwright mid-rehearsal. “Something that only theatre can do and that we’ve missed during the pandemic. And there was something [irresistible] about the foolhardiness of trying to do three plays simultaneously with the same cast in three different spaces.”

The enterprise has been an in-depth stress test of the multiple moving parts involved in any live performance — from the precision tooling of the scripts, involving numerous drafts, spreadsheets and late nights for Bush (“The worst moment was when we had an eight-minute pause where a character wasn’t where they needed to be”), to the headache of synchronising rehearsal schedules and war-gaming the unexpected (such as faulty doors or a sudden downpour).

“There are the known unknowns and then there the unknown unknowns,” says Hastie, paraphrasing former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “There are quite a lot of things we get to and we go, ‘Oh yes, of course we can’t do that, that breaks the laws of physics’.”

Curtain calls, for example, present a problem. How will they work exactly?

“It’s a great question, a great question . . . ” murmurs Elin Schofield, director of Scissors. A nervous laugh runs through the assembled company.

But the unknown unknowns are what cause the crew the most sleepless nights. When the National Theatre in 2000 staged Alan Ayckbourn’s diptych House & Garden (which likewise splits one cast across two stages) they developed a contingency plan: an “emergency” barking dog sound effect would activate if an actor was delayed en route, warning the actors onstage to slow down. But, Bush explains, adding a third play means there is no such safety net here: “It’s the knock-on effect when you change one thing that blows the wheels off.”

Rock / Paper / Scissors is far more than a masochistic exercise in technical knowhow, however. It’s something much deeper: a joyous celebration of the immediacy and collaborative nature of live theatre and a compassionate and nuanced exploration of a far-reaching contemporary question.

Bush’s trilogy is set in a scissors factory: a one-time exemplar of Sheffield’s proud tradition of steel and blade production, now reduced to a handful of apprentices working in a corner of the building. The action unfolds over a single, critical day as three generations battle over the future of the site. Should it continue as a factory and keep that legacy alive (Scissors)? Or find a new life as a music venue (Rock)? What about converting the space into upmarket flats (Paper)?

At the project’s heart is the question of what we do with our city centres, our architectural heritage and the buildings that once housed the country’s industrial output. And what becomes of young people. The focus on steel is particular to Sheffield, but Bush suggests that the dilemma has much broader resonance.

“Any sizeable town or city is going to be known for a thing that it doesn’t really do any more and is going to have these discussions,” she says. “We’re trying to figure out what cities are for, what high streets are for and what we can use those social spaces for.”

The key to the trilogy is that it offers no single answer. Named after the playground game, in which any player can beat another, the three plays work as standalone dramas, but together offer a 3D approach in which no one argument has the upper hand. Anthony Lau, directing Rock, likens it to the meme in which three Spidermen stand in a circle pointing at one another.

That triple perspective is very important for Bush, particularly in a world riven by culture wars and blame games: “We’re all heroes in our own narratives, but we all inadvertently have the potential to be villains somewhere else. Here we have three different visions, three different generations, three different perspectives. Each of those generations — an older generation approaching retirement, a younger generation coming out of school looking at the prospects facing them, and a squeezed middle — has an argument to feel like they are the most aggrieved.”

In the rehearsal rooms you can sense the way the protagonists’ concerns are reflected in the tone and texture of the plays, and the way each show is tailored for its particular theatre. Scissors, destined for the 400-seat studio space, is intimate, the room filled with workbenches, tools, and racks of scissor blanks (provided by working factory Ernest Wright). The script is funny and the mood is edgy and snippy, charged by the energy and frustration of the young apprentices.

The rehearsal space for Paper (which will play under the Lyceum’s proscenium arch) feels instantly drier, the dialogue crisply witty: this is a place where arguments about money, paperwork and principles play out among disused desks and stacks of boxes and files. The more open and epic Rock will occupy the 980-seat thrust-stage Crucible, a large empty expanse in which the characters battle it out in great duets.

“The physical architecture of the space defines the tone and style of the work that is going on in it,” says Lau. “It’s extraordinary to be able to celebrate those three different spaces in one project. It shows how they complement each other and how you can find different ways of turning the spotlight on characters and ideas through shape. The actors are having to readjust, mid-show, to different scale and size and tone of performances.”

For the cast the challenge will be to shuttle between the three theatres, keeping characters consistent while adapting to the requirements of each venue. And the structure also means that no actor has a minor role overall: a character who appears for five minutes in one play could be the lead in another. For Bush, that richness is the biggest takeaway from this remarkable, audacious and playful epic.

“Theatre is a machine for empathy,” she says. “This is a collective of people from very different socio-economic backgrounds, walks of life and generations who all feel short-changed. No one in any of these plays has the life that they either desired or thought they were entitled to, and they’re having to wrestle with that. Being able to balance these three and say ‘there are no villains here’ feels important. These are stories for a very uncertain time.”

June 16-July 2, sheffieldtheatres.co.uk

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