Wonder Fools - the Glasgow theatre company that's thriving despite a lack of core funding

Positive Stories for Negative Times. It’s the title of Glasgow theatre company Wonder Fools’ biggest project, an astonishing youth theatre initiative that has involved almost 10,000 young performers and theatre-makers from a dozen countries, over the last four years.

It might also, though, be a fine title for the story of Wonder Fools’ two founders, Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse, since they graduated from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2016; because if ever there was a positive story for what have often been negative times in Scottish theatre, it is the tale of how these two young theatre-makers have forged their company – founded in 2017 – into a small but blazing powerhouse of invention and activity, surviving even through the difficult pandemic years.

“We emerged into a world that we knew was going to be a lot less welcoming than it might have been ten years earlier,” says Robbie Gordon. “Austerity was really starting to bite, and even the Arches had closed down – it had been a creative home from home for years for contemporary performance graduates like us. So we knew things were going to be tough; and I guess we were prepared for it.”

Oràn

It wasn’t their way, though, to solve the problem by heading for London, or some other theatre metropolis. On the contrary, both Gordon and Nurse are dedicated to what they call the “7:84 idea” of making theatre for, in and about the kinds of working-class communities where they grew up; Wonder Fools’s website describes the company as “working with communities to tell their stories, throughout Scotland and beyond”.

So it was hardly surprising that their breakthrough hit production, back in 2018, was 549: Scots Of The Spanish Civil War, a show inspired by local stories of the miners who went to fight in Spain from Gordon’s home town of Prestonpans, in East Lothian. And since then, Gordon and Nurse have worked on, piecing together grants from project to project, benefitting from the current funding preference for shows with a clear purpose in terms of youth and community work, and building partnerships with theatres from the Traverse in Edinburgh – where Gordon has become a linchpin of the theatre’s long-running Class Act project – to the Gaiety in Ayr and Dumfries Theatre Royal.

“We’ve always just really enjoyed working together,” says Nurse, who specialises in directing, although he is also a powerful writer. “So we decided to stick with it, and see what we could achieve. We do work separately sometimes; but ten years on, the partnership is still where we have most fun, and in some ways, we’re enjoying it more than ever.”

And that sense of enjoyment, and of hugely varied creative energy, is evident in the company’s packed schedule for the coming months, which includes their first ever Wonder Fools Edinburgh Fringe show, a festival return to the Traverse of the theatre’s 2023 smash hit Same Team – which Gordon and Nurse co-wrote – and a new production at Cumbernauld Theatre of David Greig’s powerful 2013 drama The Events, a hugely timely piece about the aftermath of a violent shooting incident in a peaceful community.

“Our Fringe show, Oran, is really in some ways a return to our creative starting-point,” says Jack Nurse, looking back to early Wonder Fools pieces such as The Coolidge Effect, a reflection on the grip of pornography on our society. “Oran – Gaelic for song – is a modern take on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the legend of a musician who travels to the underworld to find his dead wife, but loses her again on the return journey. We’re working on the music for the piece with the band vanIves, whom we’ve often worked with before; and Robbie will perform the show alone on stage, with a sound desk which he will control.”

The Traverse’s Same Team, by contrast – written by Gordon and Nurse last year after intense community work with a street soccer team in Dundee – could hardly be a more thrillingly physical piece of ensemble theatre, brilliantly directed by Bryony Shanahan, and featuring a superb cast of five. After the Fringe, Nurse will move on to the new Cumbernauld Theatre at the Lanternhouse, where he will direct a long-overdue Scottish revival of The Events, featuring two professional actors, and a specially created community choir.

And later in the autumn, the company will plunge into another cycle of its astonishing Positive Stories For Negative Times project, engaging over 3,000 young people – half in Scotland, most of the rest from elsewhere in the UK and Ireland, some from countries as varied as South Korea, Italy, Sweden and the USA – in the business of choosing their own themes, and performing the short plays written for them by a top-flight team of writers, both on various online platforms, and at a series of live summer festivals.

“We have just one rule about our working partnership,” says Gordon, Wonder Fools’ energetic animator, writer and movement director. “And that is that we never live together in the same flat. We did it once, for a month, when I was between flats, but that was enough. And no, we’ve never had any core funding for the company of any sort, although we have had brilliant project support, for example from the Gannochy Trust, who are great.

“By and large, though, we seem to be able to make it work, leaping from project to project, enjoying them all. And now we just can’t wait to get into this latest season of work; to see how it goes, and what we can take forward into the next season, and the one after that.”

Oran is at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, 31 July-25 August. Same Team is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 30 July-25 August. The Events is at Cumbernauld Theatre at Lanternhouse, 28 September-5 October. The Positive Stories for Negative Times festivals will take place in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stornoway and Dumfries in the summer of 2025.