Leaving drama school, like leaving university, is a step into the unknown. One moment, life is relentless. Then, suddenly, it’s over. No safety net, no clear next step, just freedom. Exhilarating, terrifying freedom. That uncertainty led us to create Fragen Network, secure our first professional venue and produce our next play, Blush of Dogs.
When you're inside the drama school environment, you don’t realise how many resources you have at your fingertips. Maybe it’s because you can’t see the wood for the trees. Time is abundant, but so are the demands. You’re drowning in a relentless cycle of acting exercises, directing preparation, script readings, film shoots, rehearsals, voice work, movement, singing, dramaturgy. The list is endless. And that’s before you even get to the twelve-hour teaching days. Every corridor is littered with exhausted students, slumped over sofas, running lines for the thousandth time, brains brimming over with new words and actions to be crammed into their heads in the short breaks between rehearsals. It’s exhilarating, it’s exhausting, and it feels like the centre of the universe.
Then you leave. And suddenly, the chaos is gone. The world opens up, but instead of a relief, the freedom is overwhelming. There’s a vacuum. No schedule, no structure, no one chasing you for your notes, your scene work, your presence. When you leave drama school, the safety net disappears, and with it, the endless access to rehearsal rooms, free camera equipment, willing actors and crew who would throw themselves into your projects without hesitation, as you would throw yourself into theirs. It takes a while to sink in just how abundant the resources were, how much time you had, the opportunities, the people, the spaces. How much more work you should have, could have, would have done, if the demands hadn’t been so great already. In the thick of it, you’re trying your hardest to alleviate the burden of all those brain-numbing hours. In retrospect, you wonder what if you’d only driven that little bit more.
Every production is a battlefield. Every piece of art that makes it to an audience is a triumph against the odds. We judge art, and we are judged in turn, but we respect anyone who pushes through the madness to create something real.
In drama school, everyone is in the same boat, trading favours without a second thought. Outside, everything has a price, whether it's money, time, energy, reputation. It all has to be carefully rationed. The exchange becomes a game in itself, one that can be fulfilling to play when it works out, but that can also be soul-destroying when nothing seems to go your way. You quickly come to understand the economics behind every decision that you and all of your collaborators have to make, whether it’s the economics of finance, of energy, of time or, most delicate of all, the economics of status.
Fragen Network is a small company, maybe not the most prestigious out there, and we love making small theatre. We understand that doing small theatre means that, from time to time, an artist might feel they are sacrificing a better job if they agree to take part in your project. This isn’t drama school anymore. This is the real world. Artists are scraping by at the best of times, especially actors. Paying your bills, pleasing your agent, growing your career, earning a reputation, these are immense pressures on their shoulders. At the same, if you don’t do those smaller, boutique artistic jobs, you might never act, you’ll never get seen, and the reputation cannot grow.
Leaving Drama Centre in 2014, we had a vague idea of the company we were to become. We had staged one production, experimented with a way of working that we liked, and Roland, our artistic director, had directing experience. But where do you go from there? What do you choose when the options are endless, and the funding non-existent?
Blush of Dogs emerged from a strange series of events. Roland’s first professional writing-directing gigs were at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008 and 2009. The legendary Scottish-Italian impresario and artist Richard Demarco plucked him out of an obscure boarding school in the Mendip Hills and gave him a shot at producing a play. That first show, Stalemate, might deserve a blog post of its own, along with the next adventure when, a year later, Roland returned to the Fringe with Man Pursued.
In 2014, after years working in opera and fresh out of Drama Centre, he was back visiting the Fringe when Richard introduced him to the extraordinary Polish theatre company Arka. Their integration of disabled and non-disabled actors was incredible, and their show, about the wild sex life of Stephen Hawking, was scandalous, moving, and hilarious. You can read more about them here:
Over drinks, they asked if Roland wanted to collaborate. At that time, he was toying with the idea of adapting the myth of Thyestes for the stage, an ancient story of warring brothers that ends in child murder, ritual sacrifice and cannibalism. He pitched it to them, they loved the sound of it but, as ever in the world of the arts, things didn’t quite come together. The script was written but the show, to our lasting regret, has never (yet) been made.
It meant, though, that by the end of the autumn 2014, we had a new script ready to go into production. All we needed then was a venue, a new cast, a production team, and a company name to bind it all together.
Finding the venue was surprisingly easy. CJ, a great friend of the company and one of our earliest supporters, knew of a pub in Chiswick called the Tabard. That was the only lead we needed. We went along, showed up one drizzly winter afternoon, met with Simon Reilly and Jessica Stewart, walked out onto their beautiful stage and it was love at first sight. We popped the question, could we use their exquisite space for our mad retelling of an Ancient classic, and they said yes. Fragen had our first professional venue, for our first three-week run in London. Exciting times. But that was when the hard work really began.
09.02.25
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