Beau Hopkins, Artistic Director of Contemporary Ritual Theatre, and writer-director of the acclaimed folk tragedy SALT, discusses the play, which comes to the Riverside Studios on 3-15 March following a UK-wide tour.
The lights go down. The three actors enter the stage. They take up a heavy ship’s rope and lay this in a circle while singing a sea shanty. The floor of the theatre is transformed into a mythic zone, and the ritual has begun…
When I founded Contemporary Ritual Theatre in Great Yarmouth in 2023, I wanted to create experiences, rather than plays; and I wanted these experiences to emerge from the essential power of theatre as a form rather than the treatment of a particular subject or issue; and I wanted the results to be visceral, emotional, mesmerising: something people would remember forever.
When we performed our first project SALT at the Drill House in Great Yarmouth in 2024, one audience member, a gruff old man, pulled me aside at the end of the show. He showed me his tattooed forearm and said, “Look at that. My hairs are standing on end. I’m covered in goosebumps. I’ll never forget what I saw tonight.” That remains a keystone moment in my creative life.
We are trying to create a new form: something innovative, challenging, memorable: a contemporary ‘ritual theatre’.
It seems to me that it’s in the nature of doing something new that people struggle to react articulately – there is no ready critical language or set of references for paraphrasing the experience. It stays lodged in the memory, mute and solid, percolating in feeling, slowly to be digested into thought. Goosebumps and stunned silence, admissions of incapacity, are apter forms of reaction here, perhaps, than gushing praise.
Goosebumps and stunned silence: these also form the emotional currency of the play itself; for SALT doesn’t concern characters who can verbalise their inner lives or leisurely exercise their thoughts in great ranging speeches: it concerns the brutal, the inarticulate, the thwarted, the outcasts; those who reveal themselves in abrupt acts of violence and tenderness in a world where purpose and meaning means survival…
Set in a primitive, God-fearing fishing community on the East Norfolk coast in 1770, SALT unfolds in a wild and violent world, where men and women must struggle daily in the shadow of death; for they live by the mercy and bounty of the sea, the great giver and taker of life.
Our story concerns a hulking but childlike young fisherman, Man Billy, who lives in a hut among the dunes with his domineering mother, Widow Pruttock. Billy longs to go away aboard the larger fishing vessels with the other men of the village, but his mother is determined to keep him close: knowing her son is prone to outbursts of savage violence, she fears what might happen should she let him go. Into this cold and thwarted life comes Sheldis, a travelling singer with supernatural gifts. A wild, spirited but sinister figure, Sheldis is determined to unloose the passions and desires trapped within Billy and Pruttock. But as Billy’s obsession with her grows, Pruttock, believing him bewitched, will do anything to break the spell.
Filled with sea shanties, folk hymns and raucous dances, SALT is a visceral and mesmerising journey into a stark, mythic world of salt and song. Here the forces of sea and earth collide with magic, terror and elemental passion…
But if SALT is an instance of a new form of ‘ritual theatre’, what exactly makes a work of art an active ritual?
I believe the essence of the theatre, as opposed to mere spectacle, is revealed by stripping back the apparatus of performance; by removing every trapping and ornament until all that remains is the essential encounter of performers and audience in a shared physical space. During a play, this space undergoes a kind of enchantment, in which the bare theatre floor is transformed into a mythic zone in which the action can unfold; and both spectators and performers collaborate in that imaginative enterprise. Where the performance is successful, the encounter leads, I believe, to a collective experience of transformation: we leave the theatre feeling subtly redefined, even if this feeling is transient; and where it is enduring, it can deeply mark the lives of those who participated. This is the ritual in ‘ritual theatre’.
We make this explicit in the very first scene of the play. The three actors enter and lay a large ship’s rope in a circle while singing the sea shanty Haul Away Joe. This opening transports the audience into the world of 1770, while also establishing the key conventions of the play: anyone who is inside the rope is ‘on stage’ – if a character leaves a scene, they simply step outside of the rope; while ‘off stage’ they remain connected to the action within the rope, prowling its edges, weaving in and out of the audience. With this minimal, visceral and rhythmical staging – his connection in and over the rope beats like a pulse throughout the play – we emphasise the physical and imaginative link between performers and audience. We accentuate the sensual and immersive nature of this connection through songs, masking, raucous dances, and improvised percussion using breath, stamp and props such as bones, bottles, knives and baskets.
The effect of this visceral and rhythmical style is to create a mesmerising – some have called it hypnotic – ritual experience. And when we toured the play throughout the UK last year, we found that audiences frequently reverted to similar expressions to describe their experience – “Unforgettable”, “Enthralling”, “Like nothing I’ve seen before”, “I had goosebumps”. Audience also dwelt on how our incredible cast of three – Mylo McDonald, Emily Outred and Bess Roche – give extraordinary performances in which they exhaust both body and soul…
We toured SALT to 14 venues across the British Isles, from the Isle of Wight to the Shetland Islands. We performed in circus tents, outdoor theatres, village halls, multi-arts centres and larger regional theatres like the Hull Truck and the Dukes in Lancaster. We spent almost a month together in the Highlands of Scotland, driving from venue to venue in a van. It was an incredible journey, and the play grew with each experience of a different place.
We performed in several places where our venue overlooked the water: Lerwick in Shetland, Findhorn in Scotland, and in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. Our last performances took place at the fantastic Marine Theatre in Lyme Regis, and during our final night, a storm howled overhead, and we could hear the wind thump on the roof, and the waves crash against the shingle. The presence of the elements lent an extraordinary energy to the performance; we were reminded of the forces that lay outside our will and control. It was a kind of savage blessing, a sign that we’d come to the right place; a culmination of the ritual.
SALT culminates its UK tour with a run at Riverside Studios from Tuesday 3 – Sunday 15 March. For further information and to book tickets, visit here
