Stigma, silence, shame
- fragentheatre
- Apr 4
- 5 min read
In 2015, we began working on what would become 5 out of 10 Men, a show that emerged from a year-long exploration of male suicide, masculinity, and the body. This is the first in a three-part blog series reflecting on that journey: from our early encounters and workshops, through devising and staging the show, to finally taking it to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016.
Why We Had to Do This
We didn’t know exactly what the show was going to be when we first began. What we did know was that something had to be said. In the UK, suicide remains the single biggest killer of men under 50. The statistics are stark: five out of ten men who die under 50 take their own lives. According to the Office for National Statistics, three-quarters of suicides in England and Wales are by men. And yet, the conversation around male mental health is still riddled with stigma, silence, and shame. So we asked ourselves: how do we speak about it? How do we bring this to a stage without flattening it into a slogan? How do we make theatre from a subject so loaded with personal grief, societal avoidance, and emotional complexity?
Meeting Duncan was the Spark
The project really began when we met Duncan in the autumn of 2015. Our friend Mike Corsale had worked with him at the Barbican, where Duncan talked to him about making a piece together that would focus on male depression expressed through embodied action. We had just finished Blush of Dogs with Mike in April so he suggested us as collaborators. We met up for a chat at the National Theatre. Even that first meeting was electric. Duncan’s physical presence, his warmth, and his intuitive grasp of space and emotion drew us into an inevitable collaboration.
Duncan and our Artistic Director Roland had both struggled with depression over the years. Roland lost his mother to suicide when he was a boy, and Duncan been through many years of deep personal crisis. In reaching out to deal with his feelings in a creative way, he had forged strong connections with many men going through similar battles. So when Duncan asked us to work on something that confronted male suicide head-on, we didn’t hesitate. This was a project we needed as much as wanted to make.
An Apprenticeship in Movement
There was a chance for us to make a show to take to the Edinburgh Fringe with theSpaceUK. Duncan had a friend in Edinburgh, Charles, who could offer us a venue for the summer of 2016. That gave us a deadline. From September to August, we had a year to research and develop, to write, to rehearse, to create our show. That year was different to any project we had ever worked on before. What we entered into was a deep dive into the relationship between body and feeling.
For Roland, working with Duncan was an apprenticeship in movement. "It's not often that you work with someone who has a legitimate genius for what they do," he remembers, "but Duncan is one of those people. He has a genius for running a room. The way he uses minimal instruction to set off whirring dynamism in groups of performers, it's outstanding. Watching him work up close like that, it was a free Masters in ensemble work."
Coming out of the tradition of Drama Centre training, we were already attuned to the power of embodied performance. But Duncan took it to another level. With just the smallest adjustment, a change in posture, a shift in energy, a gentle prompt, he could steer a whole ensemble into emotionally resonant, physically intricate explorations. His process was wordless as possible, intuitive, often playful. And yet, it always circled back to the deepest themes we were exploring: vulnerability, grief, rage, despair.
The Workshops: Playing with Pain
Over the course of the year, we ran a series of exploratory workshops with different groups. We worked with men and women, with professional actors and complete newcomers. The central theme was always the same: how do we explore male suicide through the body?
Each session felt like a world unto itself. We themed workshops around fatherhood, vulnerability, silence, shame. We used games, improvisations, image-making, physical scores. Play became our way in. We demanded a lot of the participants because we asked them to bring themselves. We didn't offer characters. They could choose how much to share explicitly, but the body doesn't lie. The generosity of the truth they all shared was exquisite. Through play, they accessed memories and emotions they hadn’t touched in years. Through play, we built trust. Through play, we began to find the material that would eventually feed into 5 out of 10 Men.
There was a point when it felt like maybe the workshops were the work. That there was no need to produce a show. So much healing, so much truth, emerged from those rooms. Sometimes it felt like putting on a performance out of this material would almost be reductive. But we had a venue. We had a deadline. And we had something to say.
From Exploration to Articulation
2016 dawned. As we moved into towards February and March, the process shifted. We needed to start thinking about the practicalities of going to the Fringe. We had to begin shaping something for performance. We had to turn the formless, beautiful chaos of our workshops into something an audience could receive. This meant narrowing the ensemble, drawing out recurring themes and gestures, writing text, editing it down, writing again. All stuff we'll be writing about in our next blog post.
We started to see that male suicide wasn’t just about death. It was about the silence. About performance—the masculine performance we’re taught to maintain from childhood. About inherited traumas, broken lines of communication, the absence of role models. About the pain men often bury so deep it turns inward and destroys them. Our job was to bring all of that to the surface without preaching, without oversimplifying. Just showing. Just letting it breathe.
Why This Work Matters
We were making this show at a time when conversations about men’s mental health were only just starting to gain traction. Campaigns like CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) and Movember were beginning to break through into mainstream awareness, but theatre hadn’t caught up. Too often, we found male vulnerability was still portrayed as weakness, or treated with ironic distance. We wanted to show something different. Something raw, unfiltered, alive.
Because the truth is, male suicide isn’t just a statistic. It’s the story of the friend who stopped texting back. The father who never said what he felt. The brother who never made it to 30. It’s the silence after the joke, the ache in the chest that never gets spoken aloud. It’s everywhere. And theatre, we believed, and still believe, is one of the strongest spaces where we can actually hold that kind of silence together.
Coming Next: Building the Show
In the next blog post, we’ll dive into how we created the final production: writing the text, working with Oberon to publish it, refining the ensemble, and preparing to take it to the Edinburgh Fringe. We’ll also share what we learned about actually taking a show to the Fringe, and how we are still using the lessons we learned back then in our work now.
Call to Action
If you or someone you know is struggling, please know you're not alone. Organisations like CALM (https://www.thecalmzone.net/) and Samaritans (https://www.samaritans.org/) offer support and listening ears.
And if you’re a theatre-maker looking to explore difficult themes through collaborative, embodied work, stay with us. The journey of 5 out of 10 Men is far from over. Join us next time as we get into the heart of turning research into performance.
05.04.25
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