My Projects

About BrassWhistle Theatre Co. BrassWhistle Theatre Co. is a new collaborative company founded by theatre-makers Billy Abbey, Sam Langley, and Ed Clancy. We create original live performance that weaves together multiple narratives, placing familiar stories in unfamiliar contexts to challenge perspectives and spark conversation. Our work sits at the intersection of storytelling, movement, and play — a space where politics meets poetic expression. We are driven by the desire to ask meaningful questions: Who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going? Through dynamic and deliberately crafted performances, we aim to invite our audiences into that inquiry with us. We’re currently developing our debut production, set to premiere next year — and we can’t wait to share more when the time comes

‘I’ve never heard a note’ – Clive Wearing. Performed at York Theatre Royal on the 30th May, and again at Edinburgh Fringe in the summer, ‘Void’ is a piece of work that is framed around the loss of memory, identify, love, music, and the relationship between the loved ones affected by diseases like Alzheimer’s, Dementia, and other related afflictions to memory, such as Amnesia. The show was a result of a year long process, which began with the creation of ‘Seven’ Theatre, named after the inspiration for the show, ‘The Man with the Seven Second Memory’, in which we are introduced to Clive Wearing, a musician who had been diagnosed with severe amnesia and was only able to recall the last 7 seconds of his life at any one time. However, whenever he was in front of an instrument, he could play perfectly, almost as if he had been tethered back to his life before being diagnosed. He would then go on to deny his ability and claim that he had never heard a note. This concept of Clive being able to connect with music sparked inspiration in our company and raised the question of “what remains when memory fades? Are we just a collection of moments, or is there something deeper that defines us?” The process began and the company experimented with several forms of theatre, such as verbatim, vignettes and autobiographical, taking experiences from our own lives and using them as fuel to create images, song, and dance. We inherited the thematics of travelling through space through a comment that Clive’s wife made in the documentary. She claimed that Clive stepping outside his front door would be like a spaceman being untethered from his spaceship. From this, we began experimenting with movement and how we could braid in the idea of space, whilst keeping the show connected with its original concept, memory. At this point in the process, the company had 2 key concepts that were braided into the show, Memory loss, and Space. We felt that this wasn’t enough, and after a long discussion on how we could involve something else, we looked back at the documentary and realised music was the key to unlocking the potential of Void. We decided that David Bowie would be an artist to bring in, framing our characters on the surface as people travelling through space, who have all lost their identity, and can only remember how to play songs by David Bowie. This concept boosted the end result, as we could use the moments of musicality to portray pure happiness and joy, whilst creating a bittersweet effect, as the music is the only thing that fuelled us with life. After performing Void, I realised that our original question of what remains when memory fades couldn’t be answered, but I don’t think it needed to be. The show became about love, specifically the love that is around people who suffer with memory loss. It didn’t need an answer because there isn’t one. We are the ones that remain with those who can’t remember, and we will always be there for them. The performance became bittersweet, as it didn’t need to have a traditional happy ending, but it became clear that we were there to remind the audience to love and care for each other, and remember the best of people when their memory starts to fade. Void taught me about perseverance whilst making. There were times in the process where it felt like the meaning of the show was moving further away, making it difficult to commit to rehearsal. However, I remembered to trust the process, and in the end, Void was a beautiful show, which didn't need a clear and transparent meaning or message, all we needed to show was love, and audiences will understand.

“Hope of another life one must deserve” - Camus The development of A Chance Beyond the Sea started in 2023, alongside the Ocean Gate tragedy. I wanted to create a show in which the cast of characters were trapped in a confined space, and unable to escape, but when it was revealed that the passengers of the Ocean Gate submarine had all died, it inspired me to look further into death and how it was perceived by the masses that saw it in the media. During the same week of the Ocean Gate tragedy, I noticed that a smaller news article was released, detailing the events of a boat that sank whilst carrying 500 people migrating from Messenia. The difference between the publicization of these two tragedies intrigued me, as the Messenia boat was given much less attention or sympathy than the OceanGate submarine, which received multiple headlines and a wave of sympathy from the media. Why did the Messenia boat receive less? I decided to research into the absurd and existential, drawing from performances by Beckett, Artaud and Jean-Paul Sartre, in order to create a feel for the show, which was always going to be abstract and open to interpretation. I began running a script with a few colleagues, and we discovered that the concept was worth working on, at least as a good starting point for our rehearsal. During this process, a question arose. Why are we doing this and what do we really want the show to be? In order for this process to begin ethically, I concluded that this show had to be about us. I would place myself in the submarine with four others, who would also play themselves, and we use this method to step into the shoes of those who died, whilst using our own lives to commentate on entitlement and privilege. We experimented with multiple moments of song and dance, which brought comedy into the performance, as well as working on several movement sections that reinforced the abstract nature of the show. I also wrote various poems, that would be performed as spoken word, directly to the audience. Asking them to think and question what really matters in our lives. After performing A Chance Beyond the Sea, the true meaning of the show presented itself, and gave it weight on stage. Highlighting the injustice of the Messenia Boat’s media attention, whilst commentating on privilege and entitlement and performing with the chemistry of friendship all had key roles in transforming the show into an interesting and impactful piece of theatre. The research into the absurd and the existential gave me theory behind the process. And as Albert Camus states ‘hope of another life one must deserve’ proved to be an integral quote for thought during the development. The characters in my show constantly expect to be saved, but what gives them the right to a second chance, when so many lives are lost and ignored every single day, whether that be the Messenia Boat tragedy, or the multiple conflicts happening outside the UK. A Chance Beyond the Sea highlights ignorance, by placing people of privilege in the shoes of the unseen and unheard, and asking the audience to listen and see them. Through this process of performing and making my first independent project, I learnt about successful collaboration. Working with others can be challenging, and there were times where the flow of the rehearsal would pause. To combat this, we made sure that we were honest with each other, and always spoke with kindness in the space, allowing time to breath and come back with a fresh mindsets. I found that this was the key to creating the chemistry that pushed the show to a deeper level, where audiences could see our friendship, and listen to our voices whilst asking questions about who we are really speaking for.

“What the Map cuts up, the story cuts across” – Conquergood 2002 During my 2nd year of university, the ensemble and I created Twelfth Day: Dead Drunk and Drowned. We began researching the concept of braiding and performance of the other, along with focusing on the Balkan Wars that took place in the 1980’s to 90’s, leading to the fall of Yugoslavia, and the series of wars that followed. One of our points of research was Dwight Conquergood’s Interventions and Radical Research, where he quoted Michael de Certeau who stated that “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across”. At the time, we understood this as a commentary on stories, and how they can travel across the world, sharing similarities and differences. But it was the means of travel that was important here, as looking back at the Yugoslavian war, the country was divided into several different states, and the gruesome war crimes that followed were responsible for the murder of 140’000 people. The stories had travelled, but at what cost? I was inspired by the level of research that went on in this process, and I have carried many of the same skills into more recent performances since then. As an Ensemble, we were given Shakespear’s ‘Twelfth Night’ as a starting point for the thematics of our performance, using it as a framing device to tell the real message and discover why this story needed to be told. I found this to be crucial, as during this process is when I discovered that having multiplicity in performance can be integral for its success. The more things happening on stage, the more an audience member will investigate it and think about it afterwards. The rehearsal process quickly became a series of combining Shakespeare with themes from the Yugoslavian wars, and our own stories, which allowed us to become our own version of refugees, creating images from moments where we’ve had to travel away from home, along with spoken word from Shakespeare, song and dance. I learnt a lot during the creation of this project, and it sparked my interest in the ethics of gaining authority in performance of the other, as well as the level of research that the artist must partake in, in order to develop a meaningful piece of theatre.