“When you say beer, that’s not bitter is it?” a member of Slunglow Theatre asks her colleague as a queue of stony-faced punters builds up at the bar. It’s one of the company’s first nights managing the Holbeck, a working men’s club in the British city of Leeds, and things aren’t going well: the lager tastes funny, there’s no real ale until the end of the month, and the pints are being served with a head of foam that takes up a third of the glass.
This toe-curling scene features in Standing in the Rain, a short documentary by Brett Chapman that explores what happened when one of Arts Council England (ACE)’s ‘National Portfolio Organisations’ – arts entities that receive a regular public subsidy – took over the management of a member-owned, volunteer-led social club on a working-class estate.
Slunglow are known for large-scale productions performed outside traditional theatre spaces which aim to reach audiences who rarely cross the threshold of the auditorium - audiences that have been excluded from much mainstream arts culture because of their class, race or ability. They once spent a week camping outside the Royal Shakespeare Company attempting to ‘open the portal to the fairy world.’ Another production transformed the underground car park of the Barbican in London into a genuinely terrifying and immersive vampire experience.
