Kneehigh's touring mothers

SOLT and Equity have announced a deal that will see West End management ‘carefully and sympathetically’ consider any requests for flexible working, including job shares. But many regional theatre companies have already been showing London how it’s done – none more so than Cornwall’s touring company Kneehigh, which has been supporting mothers who take their children on the road since its founding in 1980.

Its Bristol-based company stage manager Steph Curtis, 40, is mother to two-and-a-half-year-old Finley. She has been working with Kneehigh for 12 years. Her partner, James Gow, is a 29-year-old musician – ‘I’ve got a toyboy’, she jokes – and the pair are currently touring with the show Dead Dog In A Suitcase, a radical adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera, for 13 weeks… with their son in tow.

‘Before I was pregnant, before we even discussed having a child, I interviewed someone who had a six-month-old and had just been on an enormous arena tour,’ Steph recalls. ‘When I asked how she made it work, she said “Oh, I just asked for all the subsistence money, rather than the hotel accommodation, and I bought myself a winnebago and popped it in the car park”. I was really inspired by her, thinking “Your outlook is exactly how I would like to live my life” – that having a six-month-old baby is not an obstacle.’

Being pregnant while on tour was itself a challenge. ‘I became useless in the first three months because of baby brain. I couldn’t remember a thing, which is dreadful when you’re a stage manager,’ Steph says. ‘During the 946 tour I was pretty massive, lolloping around the stage in a boiler suit – I looked horrific. Once someone said: “Maybe you should hand that over to someone else, because what that scene has become about is watching a heavily pregnant woman lifting something she probably shouldn’t." 

‘Everyone laughed at me at the end of the tour because I would help with costume changes backstage and bend down to put someone’s shoes on, and there was a point where I thought “If I carry on this tour for any longer I won’t be able to get back up again”.’

Once their son came along, the family hit the road almost as soon as Steph’s maternity leave ended, with the Flying Lovers UK and U.S. tour. Finley was 11 months old. ‘I have to touch an awful lot of wood because it can change so quickly – I feel like every time I say, “Oh no, it’s not as hard as you think it is,” suddenly you’ve got an angry toddler on your hands and you think “This is a dreadful idea”,’ she says. ‘At some point Finley will break his arm or get chicken pox and I’ll be like “Argh”.

‘I reckon in his two-and-a-half years he’s probably stayed in 200 different bedrooms, so he’s quite used to changes of environment. So long as his day-to-day routine is the same, whether that’s with me, James, a childminder or a grandparent looking after him, it doesn’t freak him out too much every time we’re in a different city. There has been an awful lot of moving around, and I’m sure some of his tantrums are set off by him not being familiar with what’s happening, but if he ever felt negatively affected by it I would stop.’

But what about the impact on her?

‘I reckoned I was going to be a neurotic mother, thinking “I won’t put Finley to bed for six months in a row and that’s going to bother me”, because we work all six evenings a week on tour,’ she says. ‘But that has been the most surprising thing: you get more daytimes than if it was nine to five, so we spend a lot more time with Finley in the working week than I thought we would. I’ll catch up with work during his afternoon nap, then leave at around 3.30pm.’

Yet with theatre, no one day is the same – during the rehearsal and production period, and on two-show days, the couple hardly see their son. ‘On a matinee day – and James would laugh at this, because it probably isn’t always the case – I try to be a perky parent for the couple of hours we do get to spend with him,’ she says. ‘I’m not necessarily practising what I’m preaching, as he’s a bit shouty sometimes – he’s definitely entered the two territory – but you have to try to maximise those hours with him.

‘Finley goes to bed at half seven, so when we’re rehearsing we’ve found it’s sometimes not helpful if we rock up then just to say goodnight. That often kicks off an excitable child you’re trying to get to sleep – he loses it and no one’s happy – so if we’re not going to be back by half six, seven, then we’ll just stay out of the way until he’s asleep.’

With the couple often working on the same productions, and therefore having the same schedule, the financial impact is shocking. ‘It’s emotionally and mentally helpful having James working on the same show – we met doing Brief Encounter five or six years ago, so that has very much been our existence together – but we have to write off one of our wages to cover the childcare and the accommodation. We get subsistence, but we’re housing a third person, as the childminder lives with us on the road, and when we can we get a third bedroom for Finley because he sleeps much better,’ Steph says.

Royal Court artistic director Vicky Featherstone has argued that mothers working in theatre should get tax relief for childcare, and Steph agrees. ‘The cost of childcare is extortionate,’ she says, adding that it varies depending on whether the childminder is a ‘whistles-and-bells Mary Poppins', or 'just making sure your child doesn’t fall off a cliff’. ‘We are lucky to have supportive families – two grandmothers who love spending time with Finley and are able and willing to travel. This helps to give our childminder a break and make sure no one goes mad, because it’s a very unusual lifestyle,’ she says.

‘Everything drains you financially but to carry on working you just have to suck it up. I never feel hard done by; it’s our choice. I suppose you have to love this life for it to be worthwhile – I can’t see why the touring lifestyle would be beneficial if you didn’t. The work has to be creatively rewarding because you’re not doing it for the money, you’re doing it because it’s building your CV, or you want to work with those people, or you’re interested in the company. 

‘There are going to be harder times ahead, I’m sure, but I wouldn’t want my career to compromise James’s. We thought it could never work, but our home life feels a bit sickeningly idyllic in its balance.’

It’s not all plain sailing, though – imagine plane travel with a toddler, and you can picture the stress of international touring. ‘When he was a real baby it was fine, because he just slept through the flight,’ Steph says. ‘Then suddenly he’s a year-and-a-half and we’re on a flight to the States and everyone is trying to sleep but it’s not his bedtime. He kicked off for an hour and a half and we were very unpopular’ – hence why the couple will soon be leaving him behind when they head to Shanghai for a week. ‘Putting him on a long-haul flight just to be working all the time doesn’t make sense. No one needs to be put through that, least of all him,’ Steph says.

Get-outs are also more stressful with a child in tow. ‘We generate about 100 times more mess than we did when it was just the two of us, so you spend two hours frantically trying to put the Airbnb back in some order before you move on,’ Steph says.

But no matter the stresses, Kneehigh has always been there, cheering them on. ‘When I was pregnant I thought “We can never be on tour with a child”, but the company was brilliant, saying: “We can adapt to suit you”,’ Steph explains. ‘Wise Children, [founded by Kneehigh’s former artistic director Emma Rice], which I moonlighted for at the Old Vic, Oxford and Cambridge, had the same ethic. When we do go abroad there have been brilliant allowances for the fact that we’re touring with an entourage.

‘It’s important for parents to still have career ambitions and be able to continue working. It’s vital that mummy going out to work is easy street for kids, too. Workplaces have a responsibility to support parents with flexible working.’ 

When there are no shows on tour, Steph can work from home, allowing her to look after Finley while James goes to auditions and make up those hours when she can. 'The fact that the company has built this environment is phenomenal. If you empower people and support their circumstances then you’re going to get the best out of them,’ she says.

‘What’s really important for the success of touring with a child is that schedules don’t change – I'm in a slightly privileged situation, as I help put them together so I sort of doctor them to suit. What is trickiest is when someone throws in a call at the last minute – I can’t just magic up somebody to look after a child. But Kneehigh would absolutely bend over backwards to make things work. I have a friend working for another company who panicked when calls were suddenly thrown in left, right and centre the night before.’

The most landmark development for theatre mothers, though, is the job share. And Kneehigh’s alternate Widow Goodmans, Lucy Rivers and Patrycia Kujawska, are involved in one of the company’s most significant. Steph feels it’s the perfect template for the future. The actors were spared learning the role from scratch, as it is the third incarnation of the five-star production, and both have done it before. ‘Patrycia did the first, and part of the second during her pregnancy. She romped around the stage, flinging herself around until she was seven months pregnant, then Lucy took over. 

‘Because Lucy was starting the tour, she did the first week of rehearsals, and then Patrycia, who is touring with her three-year-old, came in for the second week to relearn the show by watching. They both did a run in the rehearsal room. Lucy teched the show in Southampton and Patrycia observed the tech, then they swapped in Oxford. We did an hour or two going over the dances, soundchecking, health and safety, and then she just went on – likewise with Lucy. The gaps aren’t huge; I think three weeks is a maximum.’

You would think that a job share might come with its own challenges for others on the production, but Steph insists that’s not the case. ‘Even though they are very different performers the mechanics of their track are exactly the same, so it’s easily interchangeable,’ says Steph. ‘The knock-on effects for other people are minimal other than calling everyone in an hour earlier to run some bits. You have a different personality around, but they are both marvellous so it’s a joy either way. I can see that if you have people who interpret a role differently that might have additional challenges, but with Patty and Lucy it’s a very straightforward switch.’

And, as Steph notes, it’s certainly true that the more mothers a company has on tour, the better – parents supporting one another is pivotal. For instance, Steph and Patrycia shared the same house for two months while working with Wise Children, and during Dead Dog’s London run. ‘We’re very good friends, so we were like, “If this is going to be a disaster, let’s just be open about the disaster”. There’s at times four adults and two toddlers in a house, which isn’t that big – it could all go horribly wrong. But it made me want to weep over how successful it was. We even shared a childminder.’

Of course, there is more work to be done for parents in theatre. Musical star Matt Henry recently opened up about how gay performing fathers need more support, after leaving the role of Lola in Kinky Boots because of a lack of sufficient paternity leave. But with companies like Kneehigh pushing for change by example, the future certainly looks brighter.