A filmed play by Switchers, a group of young actors from Hackney, London and Mid Powys, Wales, Acorn takes inspiration from the world and characters in Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Talents. It explores scenes from the near future, of a group of people living together in a small farming community that struggles to survive within a world of economic and ecological breakdown and authoritarianism.

It is not utopian to declare that the emancipation of humanity from the chains which its historic past has forged will only be complete when the antithesis between town and country has been abolished; the utopia begins when one undertakes “from existing conditions” to prescribe the form in which this or any other of the antithesis of present day society is to be solved

—Friedrich Engels, “The Housing Question”

On a rural compound in Wales, a young woman, played by Caitlin Williams, shucking corn in a heavy parka asks her roommates how long a newly arrived and injured guest will be staying. Food is scarce, and by the look of everyone’s mended, grease-stained work clothes and the patchwork wallpaper lining the common area, so is everything else barring social interaction. The presence of another hungry mouth has forced the question of the group’s medium-term survival; whether Acorn, the semi-religious farming community formed in the aftermath of a great war and ecological disaster, needs to institute a work requirement for residents; whether new members can join the cooperative professing that “God is change. All touch you change. All you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”

Amid general social collapse, extreme weather events have caused damage to the roof and the tractor is in need of new parts. Being cash poor, low on food, and short on hands for replanting the fields, they have only their home, a squat on the outskirts of a town whose population regards them with suspicion. A woman in a wool-lined vest, played by Mary Yekini, brings the debate to a close with an ethical argument: “We can grow or we can wither, but we will grow as equals.” Despite the hardship that will ensue from adding another member to their failing utopian cooperative, the democratic principle prevails. The ultimate problem confronting Acorn is how to do politics in an era of barbarism, water shortages and corrupt governments—when neither reform nor revolution is on the table.

Acorn, 2021, is the second production from Switchers, a theatre and film group born of Emanuel Almborg’s The Nth Degree, 2018, a self-reflective film about the production of a theatre piece collaboratively devised by young people hailing from Mid Powys, Wales, and Hackney, London. The work had a consciousness-raising, pedagogical dimension, consisting of meetings with community activists such as Stafford Scott, co-founder of the Broadwater Defence Campaign and drew parallels between the Welsh Rebecca Riots of the 1840s, and the 2011 England Riots: coded white and black, respectively.

The work established a dramatic continuum between the moral economy of the nineteenth century crowd and the racialised mob of today. It was created through the collaboration of regional community youth arts nonprofits, MPYT and Immediate theatre, with the goal of bringing rural and urban adolescents together to discover forms of solidarity in a post-Brexit political climate by exploring historical commonalities and social forces beyond demography. The political education applied not only to the making of the work, but to the form of the group itself. Midway through this production they transformed their erstwhile extracurricular amateur dramatics group into an artists’ collective, resolving to split any profits evenly.

Like Alexander Medvedkin’s Cinetrain, Switchers seek to adapt the tools of collaborative theatre-making for film production. Time-intensive play gave rise to the script: once Switchers decided on a general premise (squatters after a disaster), and gathered their influences into a workbook (Octavia Butler’s 1998 novel Parable of the Talents, widely revisited in the Trump-era for its themes of populist demagoguery and right-wing vigilantes, as well as the Yellow Vests movement and eviction defence battles at ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes in 2018), each actor created a character refined through months of improvisation and reflection. Almborg recorded and transcribed the sessions and returned the texts to the group to be workshopped. The performers identified the strongest elements of each scenario, developing them until they cohered into a full-length production, at which point the script was handed to a dramaturg for finishing touches. The screenplay was performed live four times before three cameras. Almborg edited the footage, which was discussed and revised again before post-production. This method is an adaptation of “playworld” exercises developed by Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, and broadens his Marxist application of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s perezhivanie (in psychology: lived, emotional experience), extending it into the realm of political imagination.

Answers to intractable social problems are convincingly met, if not resolved, by the instinctual needs of each improvised scene, which are reflected upon in relation to the dramatic requirements of the work as a whole. The more effectively plausible the formal solutions, the greater political purchase they seem to have. Hard questions are met with harsh compromises. When a plan is proposed for taking in vagabonds on the run from slavers and seeking work in exchange for a small wage plus room and board, a resident herself an ex-slave, played by Ruth Oshunkoya, takes offence. “Exploiting people when they’re vulnerable and desperate” goes against the purpose of Acorn. “Starving is not what this community is about either,” a man in a navy jumpsuit, played by Jamie Baker, shoots back. They compromise and adopt a two-tier wage system. Surplus-value extraction and the nuclear family reimpose themselves on the group despite its sincere commitment to a new social order—there are no fugitives from real subsumption. Despite Acorn’s capitulation in the end, it survives as a critical model. Their fraught, hopeful answers to the housing question are, in the end, “no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wage workers.”

Ciarán Finlayson, New York, 2022

Credits

Acorn – a filmed play by Switchers, 2021. 40 min, 4K video

Acorn was devised and performed by Switchers, a theatre/film group and collaborative framework composed of a network of young people from London and Mid Powys, Wales. Its members are Jamie Baker, Merlyn Hawthorne, Ellis Holt, Ruth Oshunkoya, Prince Owusu, Mary Yekini and Caitlin Williams. It was directed by Emanuel Almborg the group’s facilitator and filmed in Mid Powys, Wales and at Chats Palace, Hackney, London.

The script was co-written with Melissa Dunne, Set design and costume: Ksenia Pedan, DOP: Ben Marshall. Camera operators: Alex Shipman and Laura Seward, Sound recordist: Jack Cook, Technician: Jordan Wilkes, DOP in Wales: Tom Hall, Production: Pundersons Gardens, Colourist: John Alexander Lowe, Sound design: David Gülich, Music: Hans Appelqvist, Graphic Design: Mia Frostner, Actor training: Lavinia Hollands.

Produced with funding and support from: Kungl. Konsthögskolan, The Elephant Trust and P.G. Film.

The film is presented in collaboration with Almanac Projects who will present the next iteration of the project in 2022, with the support of Arts Council England.