Stan's Cafe is a theatre company based in Birmingham, United Kingdom, with a long track record in producing experimental theatre, installations and live art. Established in 1991, it has become "one of Britain's major contemporary theatre exports"Sian Prior, The Bulletin, Melbourne, 10 October 2006 with an "international reputation"Terry Grimley, "Grains of truth from universal principles", Birmingham Post, 13 December 2006 for devising and touring powerful and "unusual performances." It has been regarded by some critics as "one of the UK's most innovative and exciting theatre companies."Nicholas Royle, "Black Arts – Roll up! For the lorry ride of a lifetime...", Independent on Sunday, 28 November 2004
Venue and theatre production history Stan's Cafe was founded by James Yarker and Graeme Rose in 1991 – both Theatre Studies graduates from Lancaster University. The company's unusual name was derived from a real café just off Brick Lane in London.
The partnership between Yarker and Rose was from the start supplemented by collaborations with associate artists from a variety of backgrounds. With productions of Memoirs of An Amnesiac and Canute The King – the latter premiered in Moseley Road Swimming Baths – Stan's Cafe established itself as a company of exciting potential. Having rehearsed these early productions in borrowed spaces and a spare room in a rented house in the Balsall Heath district of Birmingham, the company started rehearsing and presenting work at mac (formerly Midlands Arts Centre) once it received its first significant public funding for Bingo in the House of Babel, inspired by theories of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. The company moved its office to the venue in 1997. mac also supported the company by commissioning three shows, namely Voodoo City, a show about urban magic and controlling one's own destiny; Dance Steps, an installation about a love story of two people who meet at mac; and Tuning Out With Radio Z, a three-hour-long improvised show performed in front of a live audience and webcast as a radio show with the audience invited to contribute ideas and text via SMS messages or an online bulletin board. These productions contributed to the company being described as "one of the [UK's] most tirelessly inventive theatre companies...breaking the mould of what theatre can and might be."
In 1996, Stan's Cafe won a Barclays New Stages award for its two-woman production, Ocean of Storms, about notions of gravity and ohm. It was included on its tour dates in The Royal Court's studio space. In 1998, a funding crisis prompted by the controversial and highly minimalist production Simple Maths led to one of the company's most significant productions, It's Your Film. It could be seen by only one spectator at a time, who was installed in a photo booth, eye-level positioned facing the centre of the small screen. It was commissioned for The Bond, a small independent art gallery and whilst originally planned to be presented for one night only, it went on to become an extremely prolific show touring to 37 cities in 15 countries, including an international premiere at the Theatre Formen Festival in Hannover, Germany in June 2000. The success of It's Your Film led to the company developing a strand of paratheatrical works that will be discussed in the next section.
In 2000, Good and True, a comedy that "explores how questions produce more queries than answers", was commissioned by Birmingham City Council's Forward Festival. This production toured the United Kingdom and remained in the company's repertoire long enough to be shown at the Linbury Studio in the Royal Opera House in 2003.
In order to rehearse their ambitious 'rock musical' Lurid and Insane, inspired by an obituary for the Bokassa, the company moved out of mac into a factory unit on New Canal Street above a firm of die stampers. Before its demolition in 2006, this space hosted the devising of Be Proud of Me, a collaboration with photographer Ed Dimsdale built on the language of tourist phrase books – early versions of the company's training day, A City Adventure (which is discussed further in the Education section). Giving other companies access to their space as well as hosting parties and concerts by underground bands kindled the company's ambition to run its own venue.
Between 2006 and 2009, the company operated from an office in The Big Peg in Birmingham's jewellery quarter. Whilst here the company devised and toured Home of the Wriggler, a piece inspired by the Longbridge Car Plant and its closure. Described as a "lo-fi sci-fi docu-drama", this piece was notable for its actors having to power the show's lights and sound through on-stage dynamos.
In 2007, the company was commissioned by the Vienna Festival, Warwick Arts Centre, and The Fierce Festival to make a large scale sequel to their intimate production, It's Your Film. The Cleansing of Constance Brown uses a proscenium arch 2m wide to frame the end of a corridor 14m deep with seven doors on each side. This device frames the action powerfully and is inspired by work of Insomniac Theatre, for whom Stan's Cafe members, Amanda Hadingue and Craig Stephens had also worked. This production defied financial logic by touring extensively with a show with a cast of 7 and 2 tonnes of equipment whose audience, for reasons of sightlines, was limited to fifty per performance. It has since been seen in Bucharest, Toronto and Cologne, amongst other international destinations.
In 2009, Stan's Cafe moved into a vacant portion of the A E Harris and Co. metal working factory which provided sufficient space to host rehearsals, storage and the company's office. The freedom of having their own venue allowed the company to work outside the normal restrictions associated with having to hire or be booked by established venues. This freedom was used to make The Just Price of Flowers almost spontaneously, written in a little over a week and rehearsed in a similar period. The show used a Brechtian approach to theatre, complete with narrator/singer and placards, to discuss the 1998 financial crisis through the phenomena of Tulipmania in The Netherlands in 2010. This low budget 'austerity production' was promoted almost entirely through social media and was initially presented for just three nights at the company's home venues using set and costumes recycled from The Cleansing of Constance Brown. Success of this initial run led to the production being re-staged, with a largely new cast, as a co-production with Birmingham Repertory Theatre.
Stan's Cafe's increasing tendency to make work over an extended period and to place pauses between premiere performances and touring can be seen in The Cardinals which was rehearsed in three blocks across 2010 and 2011 before its premiere at Domaine d'O in Montpellier, France, the venue that co-commissioned the project. A year would elapse before its second run at its other commissioning venue, Warwick Arts Centre. After a further week at The Drum in Plymouth, another year would elapse before the production was re-performed at The Roundhouse in London and Stan's Cafe's own venue in Birmingham in January and February 2013. The Cardinals' religious concerns led to a booking at the Christian Greenbelt Festival in 2012. The flat, almost childlike set of the cardinal's puppet theatre, is reminiscent of the company's very first production Perry Como's Christmas Cracker, in which two incompetent theatrical impresarios attempt to squeeze the Christian nativity story into a pantomime form.
In 2013, the company opened its first serious adaptation, an attempt to stage the vast 17th century book The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton.
Para-theatrical work The success of It's Your Film described by one critic as "the Godfather of one-on-one theatre" led Stan's Cafe to be invited to make a range of other para-theatrical projects.
In 2000, Birmingham City Council commissioned The Black Maze for its Revolution Festival on 2 and 3 January. This sensory art installation was originally constructed to be installed in galleries, but its popular successes led to its re-installation in the back of a 7.5 ton truck allowing it to visit street festivals across the UK and into Europe. It's an intimate theatre experience that's different for each participant, creating a one of a kind shared experience for those that enter in twos or threes.
In 2002, Jubilee Arts commissioned Space Station for the Birmingham – Wolverhampton Metro, which saw three astronauts appear on new platform labelled Earth North Central attempting to catch a train to the planets, a feat made apparently possible through an alteration to the maps onboard all metro trains. To make the piece possible, negotiations with the Department of Transport were needed in order to install the platform and stop the train at an authorized point to allow the astronauts to board at the end of the day. Train conductors had to become semi-official gallery guides as passengers encountered the performance (and the others that were spread out along the metro line between West Bromwich and Wednesbury).
In 2003, Radiator commissioned Broadway Hertz, a sound installation that, through placing microphones around the building allowed audience members to re-mix the building's sounds.
Almost simultaneous with the opening of Broadway Hertz was the opening of Of All the People in All the World at Warwick Arts Centre. In 2002, the company received its first ever revenue funding from Arts Council England, freeing the company from the restriction of always agreeing projects and budgets for subsidy in advance. This freedom allowed the company to spend approximately £700 on a tonne of rice, enough for each person in the UK to be given a grain. The project's simple premise that "one grain = one person" allowed for human population statistics to be represented as carefully counted/weighed piles of rice sitting on labelled sheets of white paper. The ability of the show to directly and flexibly address human concerns in an engaging and emotionally powerful manner led to the show's rapid success. It remains in the company's repertoire regularly performing around the world, mostly in theatre festivals and in a range of scales from 1 tonne of rice up to vast versions of 104 and 112 tonnes representing the entire world's population at the time of performance. The 104 tonne version for Theatre De Welt, commissioned by Marie Zimmerman, is documented in a book with photographs by Ed Dimsdale and poetry by Alan Hay. It is perhaps the success of All the People in All the World that has turned Stan's Cafe into an international festival favourite.
The freedom of their own venue allowed Stan's Cafe to pursue apparently whimsical projects. In 2009, 24 Hour Scalextric saw audience and actors racing slot cars around a vast track for 24 hours to coincide with the Le Mans race of that year. The piece was transformed into art by two commentators giving a live webcast description of the entire reach. The company's policy of pressing interesting projects without a close scrutiny of long term viability was again vindicated as schools started to request their own miniature versions of the race in order to promote literacy and mathematics. Also spinning off from the race were the two commentator figures who were later commissioned by East Side Gallery, Fierce Festival and projects who variously requested the commentators webcast commentaries on a football match – whilst only being able to watch an audience watch a match on a big screen, view from a hotel window just overlooking Birmingham's busiest street of nightclubs, the Crab Fair in Egremont, including the World Gurning Championships in 2011.