We sat down on Jack Nurse to chat about their new show The Events. Set in an ordinary town hall, The Events centres on Claire, a priest and choir leader, after an extraordinary attack shatters her community. In the aftermath, she begins a searching journey towards the person responsible, trying to live with what happened and confront the questions that remain.
How does working with a different local choir in every venue change your understanding of the play’s central questions about community and responsibility?
It’s been a joy working with a different choir in each place. It really makes each show feel unique and informed by the distinct personalities in each choir (both individual and collective). You feel very quickly that community isn’t an abstract idea – it’s made of real people, with their own histories, fears and generosity. Responsibility stops being about blame and becomes about presence: who shows up, who sings, who listens. It also becomes about the connection between one and another and how that is the most important thing. The play keeps reminding me that community isn’t something you describe, it’s something you practise, and something to hold on to.
What new layers or tensions emerge in The Events when it’s reimagined in a Scotland shaped by today’s polarisation and fractured public discourse?
The play feels less hypothetical now. Even compared to when we first staged our version in 2024. The language around fear, masculinity and division lands closer to home. In Scotland today, we’re negotiating difference constantly – politically, culturally, socially – and The Events sits right in that discomfort. What’s emerged is a sharper tension between empathy and exhaustion: the desire to understand versus the urge to withdraw. That friction feels very current. It’s important to lean into that and face the difficult conversations, especially now.
As a director, how do you balance the intimacy of Claire’s personal journey with the collective presence and power of the choir onstage?
It’s about not privileging one over the other. And exploring through the staging their interconnectivity. Claire’s journey is deeply intimate, but it only makes sense in relation to the choir. I try to think of the choir as the world she’s moving through – sometimes supportive, sometimes resistant, sometimes silent. They represent the past and a deep sense of loss, in many ways her drive through the play is to make sense of their loss, but they also represent the future and the hope of a new beginning. The balance comes from allowing both to coexist: a single person in pain, held inside a much larger, complicated collective.
In what ways does the process of co-creating with local singers influence not just the performance, but the moral atmosphere of each night?
Because the choir aren’t playing community – they are one. They are a group of people who have come together to be part of something. That’s really special. They might never have met each other if they hadn’t been part of this process. So their presence changes the temperature in the room. There’s an accountability, and a solidarity, that comes with standing next to people who’ve given their time and voices freely. It makes the questions the play asks feel less theoretical and more lived. Each night develops its own energy, shaped by who’s onstage and the fact they’ve chosen to be there together.
What does returning to a “modern Scottish classic” like The Events reveal to you about how Scottish theatre—and its audiences—have changed over the last decade?
Audiences feel more open to ambiguity now. There’s less demand for neat answers and more willingness to sit with uncertainty. The world is uncertain and complex, so the stories people want to engage with reflect that. Scottish theatre has also generally become more interested in participation, in conversation, in who’s in the room. Returning to The Events shows me that people are hungry for work that trusts them, that doesn’t simplify difficult questions, and that recognises their own lived complexity.
Do you think the act of listening, which the play insists on so strongly, is something theatre can actively train us to do better in real life?
I do. Theatre asks us to listen without interrupting, without immediately responding, without trying to win. That’s a rare discipline. The Events doesn’t reward easy listening – it asks for patience, discomfort and generosity. The hope is that by practising that together, in a room full of strangers, we can genuinely shift how we listen outside the theatre too.