The Events’ Director Jack Nurse – telling the tale of Claire, a priest and choir leader, who survives a mass shooting in her church (interview)

The Events, by David Greig and directed by Jack Nurse is produced by Wonder Fools and is on a spring tour visiting Cumbernauld, Glasgow, Dundee and Edinburgh.

First performed at Edinburgh’s Traverse in 2013, The Events is a play which tells the tale of Claire, a priest and choir leader, who survives a mass shooting in her church. She embarks upon a desperate search for answers which brings her face to face with the attacker, The Boy. 

Wonder Fools, in association with Cumbernauld Theatre, brought this to the stage in October 2024 with a live community choir, and it returns for a Scottish tour, back to Cumbernauld, in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, this Spring.

Last time they had one community choir in Cumbernauld, adding three new venues means they have four choirs performing – one at each venue. We caught up with Jack Nurse, Director of The Events and co-founder of Wonder Fools to find out more.

Tell us about play, please.

The Events is a play by David Gregg, which follows the story of a choir leader as she copes with the aftermath of a violent attack in her community by a young man known only as The Boy. The play revolves around her quest, as she describes it, her search for meaning in his actions, trying to ask the question why someone would do such a horrific thing. 

It’s quite unusual in its approach.

It’s important to speak about the form of it. Two professional actors on the stage, one plays Claire, the choir leader, and the other plays The Boy, and also all of the other characters she encounters in the story: her partner, The Boy’s father, the politician who inspired his ideology. They’re surrounded and accompanied on stage by a community choir who sing live during the performance and embody the idea of community and hope that the play ends on. 

Having the choir seems important to your ethos.

That’s what it’s all about for us at Wonder Fools – real people, working with communities, and there being a solidarity and equality of spirit in which we make the work. 

With four venues involved in the Spring tour, how has that community spirit grown?

We’re working with four different choirs. That openness, generosity, and uniqueness that community casts bring to a show that’s amplified now because we’ve got four distinct versions of the same show.

You have some familiar faces, working with the same two professional actors as in 2024.

I can’t imagine working on this play without Claire and Sam. They bring so much skill, depth of thinking and care to the play, which is so rich and so complex. They marry that really high quality of acting craft with a collaborative spirit and an openness that makes it a joy to work with them in the room. They are just lovely people, which means for a process like this that integrates a community cast with a professional cast. It’s really important to have people who are warm and understand the kind of socially engaged value of the work. They’re the perfect people to play these two parts. They’re still finding new things in the play, little discoveries that make the thing feel even more alive and detailed. 

Working with four distinct collective choirs must be exciting and risky for Sam and Clare.

That’s why they’re the right people for it. I think they come at it with an enthusiasm and genuine openness. Even when we were just working with one choir there’d be performances where one or two choir members would be off because everyone has things going on in their lives, they couldn’t make it or couldn’t make a certain rehearsal: in this kind of work, you’re constantly adapting and responding. That thing about theatre being different every night, it could not be more the case for this.

One of the real motivations, I suppose, from my perspective in terms of approaching the play was trying to find a way of integrating the community choir into the story as fully as we could: maximising the opportunities for that connection between Sam and Claire and the cast on stage. It’s like, what does this choir represent and how can that inform the storytelling pushing towards finding the most fully realised version of what that means to have 20 community actors on stage.

That also creates more risk in terms of the things that could or might be different every night, so it’s thrilling. It’s nerve wracking to watch, but it’s thrilling. 

How did you recruit the choirs and why choose to create four new ones in the way you did? 

We did an open call and were clear that there was no prerequisite on having been in a choir before or even having been on stage before. One of the reasons we decided to start four new choirs as opposed to linking in with four existing choirs is because we really wanted each group of people to be a collection of individuals from all walks of life, who might not have met each other if they hadn’t come to be part of this.

The original Cumbernauld choir was a vibrant, but cohesive mix of people that represented all kinds of corners of the community. That was our motivation. We started the new choirs in Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow. We held taster sessions so people could come in, take part, sing a song or two, play a game and find out If it was for them. All four choirs have distinct energies and personalities.

I didn’t quite realize how different it’s going to feel: that’s exactly what it’s all about. We wanted it to feel like the specific places that we’re going to and the people in those places directly and authentically inform what the work feels like. It takes on the personality of the venue. 

Although it has a common theme, it has a common change process as well. The brilliant thing about the piece is that it doesn’t present any answers. It operates in a difficult challenging grey area but because of this community choir on stage the entire time, the idea of community, people and place and what it means to be a collective and a society, that’s always extremely present. 

The most obvious example not in terms of news but in terms of the media since we premiered our production of the show of the play is Adolescence on Netflix. That was a very similar piece of work in that it zoomed in on a very specific challenging subject matter but approached it in a way that was full of care, sensitivity, nuance, and complexity; tried to view something really difficult from all angles. 

I think the play does all of those things as well and audiences want work that does ask those difficult questions and doesn’t provide easy answers, but an opportunity to reflect on everything that’s happening. It feels really important to be doing that, it’s a piece that challenges but inspires us, brings us closer together. 

Wonder Fools