Interview: John Handscombe of Good Wolf People

We don't know much about " Good Wolf People" so tell us about yourselves?

Good Wolf is a social enterprise based in South East London. We produce professional theatre with a social output and deliver drama and arts work in community settings. For example, two of our current projects are a weekly drama group running at MIND in Croydon and an arts group for people experiencing dementia and their carers at the Royal Albert Hall.

How did you get involved in the " 100-Year-Old Letter" project?

We also run an open access community drama group and for five years we’ve been making shows in a church hall in Dulwich. Last year someone heard the story of the 100-year-old letter on a podcast and brought it to our devising sessions.

To begin with it was part of a much bigger play about our local history and lost letters, but in the end we couldn’t stage it in 2024. I’d fallen in love with the story of the letter by this time and interviewed Finlay and Lucy, the couple who found it. They introduced me to the wonderful Bridge House Theatre in Penge and pointed me to the research undertaken by local historian, Stephen Oxford, of the Norwood Society. That in turn led me to the online transcriptions of one of the women’s friends’ diaries, uploaded by her grandson, Benjamin Beck.

Every connection has moved us a bit further forward in our journey and in July 2024 we staged two weeks of pre-Edinburgh shows at the Bridge House. Luke and Joe (and Dusty the Dog) who run it are amazing – if anyone is looking for a fringe venue in South London that won’t rip you off and is big on love and support, I really can’t recommend them highly enough!

It's part total fiction, part educated guesswork - and part verbatim, so Finlay, Lucy and Stephen came to watch us playing them, which was daunting, but luckily for us, they all loved it! As did Benjamin Beck.

Sadly (for us) we will not be able to see the show as the afternoon show is sold out for your run. (You will be the envy of most of the shows there). Why do you think that has happened?

So, I’ve definitely learnt a lot from having brought previous shows to Edinburgh. We have a great poster, solid blurb for the website and the most wonderful venue in Greenside – another organisation big on love and care. I think that’s so rare these days and when you find it you just hold on to it very tightly. I wouldn’t dream of taking a show anywhere else in Edinburgh! And the title is a bonus! It was just a holding title until I could think of something catchier, but when we decided to do Edinburgh I quickly realised that it puts us at the front of the website and programme, so we kept it.

We’ve done the whole flyering-all-morning-to-get-an-audience-of-2-people thing, so I really do know just how lucky we are. In fact, we had a great marketing strategy lined up, but in the end we had to just stop following it. We were emailing reviewers, then when they came back to us, we were having to apologise that we had no tickets left!

But I really can’t take credit for our incredible sales. It’s the story. People remember it. There’s a line in the play from Finlay’s interview:

“I think that the news can sometimes just feel relentless and, and, and slightly gruelling and so I think it's nice for the papers that all got in touch to run this as… I suppose it’s not necessarily a good news story - it’s a letter that was delivered very late - but its harmless. And it catches people's imagination. They love it.”

And that is clearly still true!

We submitted the details in time to be in the first wave of shows on the website in April and within a week we had sold a few tickets – which we thought was very strange! And it kept happening. We sold out the entire run of 9 shows in July and Greenside offered us some morning slots too. We took two of them so we could invite reviewers, but they sold out too fast, so I’m still not sure if we have anyone reviewing us at all.

You are only performing for a week. Can I ask the reason for that decision?

This is how I earn a living, but because we’re a community show, everyone else had to take holiday from their real jobs to do the Festival.

That was actually quite scary for us – we had a sold out Edinburgh show before we’d ever performed it, so we genuinely didn’t know if other people would love it like we did. Happily the response in London was amazing – in fact people kept assuming this was a professional cat! I couldn’t be prouder of them!

We've been been reviewing shows since 2007 but due to increasing accommodation costs have moved outside the Scottish capital. (We are currently staying in Eskbank). How are you all managing costs?

Prices are shocking. Last year I was looking at accommodation to visit just as a punter and small rooms in town were going for £1,000 a week!

This year we got some uni digs that are only available to participants, and work out at £55 per person per night. But they are miles out of town and don’t even provide towels, so we’ll see what they’re like. In 2019 we got uni digs just below Arthur’s Seat, which we’re quite nice, even if they did resemble a fancy prison. They were £50 per night per person, but were available to anyone.

The really annoying thing is that you have to pay a whole week for any part of a week you stay and our show runs for just over a week. As I am able to stay longer I decided I’d keep my room for the whole two weeks, but the uni had already sold the other days to someone else. Which means they are getting paid for our rooms twice that week. I think that’s outrageous and a real demonstration of how the Festival is run for the profit of the few with very little support for artists. It’s not sustainable and I see the whole thing collapsing in the next few years if it’s not addressed.

Putting on a show at the festival costs a lot of money. How are you funding it? Do you have any expectations about how you will do financially?

I was incredibly lucky to come into some money unexpectedly a few years ago, which is how we set up Good Wolf. In 2019 we decided bring two professional shows to Edinburgh that would enhance our reputation back home and bring us more work – which totally worked… until the pandemic had other ideas.

Those shows lost us nearly £40K, which we expected, but obviously that’s a one off and not something that’s possible for most companies.

Because none of us are getting paid for this show and we’re only here a week, the costs this time were about £5k, but even with a sell-out run and extra shows, we would still have lost about £2,000 if we hadn’t also done the London run. We’re going back to do another week in Penge in September as it’s been such a success and there’s a good chance now that we’ll break even, which is absolutely incredible. But also shows you what an absolute mess the British Theatre scene is in right now financially.

You've mentioned this isn't your first trip to the festival? What are your expectations for this year?

Having brought shows in 2019, we had very realistic expectations – which have obviously been completely thrown out of the window now!! We not only won’t have to go flyering, we didn’t even get any printed! We’ve made sure the cast who haven’t been to the Festival before are aware what a privilege that is!

What we will be doing while we’re here is promoting other shows we think are great and helping them to pick up some of our audience. If you don’t mind the outrageous plug, there’s a show called Chopped Liver and Unions by Blue Fire Theatre at Paradise in Augustines (Venue 152) which is another show about brilliant women written out of history by the patriarchy and I can’t wait to see that.

When did you first come to the Fringe and what are your memories?

Haha! So I first came to the Fringe in 1994 with my mate Pippa. We drove up. Pip was in charge of accommodation and I was navigating. She had a mate who lived on Princes Street so we were going to stay with them, but she couldn’t get hold of them (no mobile phones back then) so we ended up sleeping in the car. And my navigation was so bad I took us over the Pennines. There was a lot of stopping to open sheep gates.

We had an amazing time, saw some great shows and also crawled out of one student sketch show under the tables because it was so bad!

You are now playing two shows on some days and perform at 13.55pm. How will you pace your day?

I’ll just be running on adrenalin by then I think. They are towards the end of the run, so we should be in a good rhythm, but we kept our last day as a one day show so we can really enjoy it.

Do you have plans to see any other shows?

Yes!! Chopped Liver and Unions, Coming Out to Dead People and it’s our lighting operator’s birthday while we’re here so we’re all going to Sh!tfaced Shakespeare for that. We’ll also be trying to see as many other Greenside shows as we can – Greenside’s such a family atmosphere so we want to support everyone there.

Thanks to John for taking the time out to answer our questions and good luck to everyone at Good Wolf People for the duration of your run. If you want to try and get your hands on any tickets try your luck at https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/100-year-old-letter

Good Wolf People are Performing The 100-Year Old Letter from

August 3rd to August 10th at Greenside @ George Street