Time, Space and Possibility - SHUSH

I’m Amy Golding, a freelance director and artist, and last month I had one of those rare experiences that remind you why you make theatre in the first place. Being in a theatre playing and creating freely with no pressure. Throwing brave and raucous ideas around a safe room full of only womxn and girls in a moment in time when our rights, bodies and voices feel hugely threatened across the world was so needed.

Thanks to Northern Stage, we were given a full week in Stage Two to run a technical R&D on my new production, SHUSH.

SHUSH will be a mid-scale, flexible touring production, a radical act of reclamation and resistance. With movement, testimony, humour, and bold design, the show brings together intergenerational and cross-cultural voices of womxn and girls (including trans women and non-binary people) to explore the first moments we felt “shushed”: when patriarchy first made itself known in our lives, and how those experiences have shaped, silenced, and strengthened us.

It is both deeply personal and collective. Drawing on real stories from me and the team, our daughters, and a diverse chorus of womxn. Audiences will be invited into a visceral, joyful, and emotionally charged confrontation with systems of gendered oppression. With choreography, wild costumes, and shared laughter, SHUSH imagines, just for an evening, what it might feel like to live without patriarchy… whilst also offering a great night out for everyone!

This show will be the biggest I’ve made so far, and it brings together a lot of technical elements including large scale video projection, sound, lighting, costume alongside a professional cast and a community cast of thirty. Having proper time and space inside a theatre to explore all of this felt genuinely transformative.

I’m a very visual director. I think in images, shapes, colour and movement, and I often need to see things in order to understand them. Being able to stand in the space with our AV designer, playing with moving images through the projector and seeing ideas land on a huge cyc screen rather than imagining them in a rehearsal room, was incredibly helpful. It allowed us to test scale, clarity and atmosphere, and to discover what really works, and what doesn’t, much earlier in the process than only seeing it all at the last minute when it comes together in tech.

The same was true for sound. Having our sound designer in the room, able to play with music and sound in an auditorium space where an audience will one day sit, made a massive difference. Sound behaves so differently in a theatre than in a studio or rehearsal room, and being able to feel its full impact and to blast it out gave us a much deeper understanding of how sound will shape the world of the show.

One of the real joys of the week was how all the elements could talk to each other, performance, text, visuals, sound, light and costume rather than being developed in isolation. That kind of joined‑up thinking is hard to visualise without access to a theatre, and it’s invaluable when you’re making ambitious new work.

The R&D week also gave us something else that’s often very difficult to find time or resource for: the chance to create high‑quality marketing materials. We worked with our costume designer to experiment with early ideas, not the final costumes, but explorations of colour, texture and silhouette. Costume and colour palette are hugely important in Shush, so having space to play with this felt essential.

We then used the black box theatre and lighting rig to do a professional photoshoot, producing strong, polished images that we can now use for marketing and publicity. We also filmed material for a concept video and trailer. Anyone who makes theatre will recognise the constant chicken‑and‑egg problem: you often need to sell a show before it exists, to write copy before it’s written, and to share visuals before anything has been fully made. This week helped bridge that gap, giving us some concrete materials that can support the next stages of the project.

At the end of the week, we shared a work‑in‑progress showing. It was informal, open and honest, very much a patchwork of moments rather than a finished piece, but doing it in a theatre, with tech and lights, made it feel real. It felt like the beginning of a piece of theatre, rather than just an exercise.

The week was ambitious, we had a lot to achieve, but with the right mix of kick ass womxn on the team we made a lot happen, and we all felt a lush moment of pride at the end. It felt celebratory, generous and shared, which is how I want this project to exist in the world.

What made this sharing especially powerful was the presence of our community cast: 30 womxn and girls, including non‑binary and trans women, aged between 8 and 80. Bringing non‑professional performers into a theatre space to be part of the professional team was incredibly exciting for them and us, and they were able to invite family and friends to watch. It also gave us time to figure out what working with a new community cast in each location we eventually tour to might look like logistically and we used this as a kind of pilot.

The audience was pretty large for a work‑in‑progress, which was a bit nerve wracking but it felt important as for some community participants, this may be the only stage of the project they’re able to be part of, so it mattered that their contribution was celebrated fully.

It’s good to remember how powerful time and space can be, alongside the money to pay everyone to be there of course (shout out to Arts Council England for funding the development stage of SHUSH). Space to experiment, to fail safely, to test ideas properly. Time to let different elements meet each other and evolve together. And a place for community, collaboration and joy. And those things are hard to come by without huge costs these days. Making theatre is expensive when you pay artists properly and take the time needed to fully bake an idea into something brilliant and stage worthy. This is a struggle we are all navigating in the industry, things have got way more expensive, funding is tighter and as independent artists with big (expensive!) ambitions whatever support we can get is hugely appreciated.

Weeks like this don’t just move a project forward; they fundamentally shape what it becomes. Let’s keep making work about the things that need calling out in the world, let’s not allow censorship, finances & funding systems to push us all into playing safe, making the same old plays over and over again, let’s keep encouraging our audiences to take risks and try new things and let’s keep smashing the patriarchy!

All photo credits: Saya Rose Naruse