Daniel Grimston’s play, Fieldfare, was part of this year’s SPRINT Festival at Camden People’s Theatre, showing as a work in progress. For more about the play, you can follow Daniel’s Instagram.
Fieldfare is a queer folktale for the forests of modern Britain – boldly dissolving borders between us and nature in a kaleidoscope of poetry, storytelling, archive footage and folk song.
Daniel tells us more about the show, and the inspiration for it, below.
Your queer folktale Fieldfare was recently at SPRINT as a work in progress. What can you tell us about it?
Fieldfare is a queer folktale for the forests of modern Britain – boldly dissolving borders between us and nature in a kaleidoscope of poetry, storytelling, archive footage and folk song.
Developed through protest poetry with the Right to Roam Campaign, Fieldfare is a poetic theatre piece for one performer, creating a permeable membrane between person and place. A multimedia one-person show nodding to folk-horror and performance art, it blends dramatic narrative, live music, archive footage and field recordings to explore the queer histories of rural Britain and confront cultural paranoia around queerness as rewilding.
Ollie is a gamekeeper’s son. When his dad catches a strange, bark-clad figure in a trap, something awakens that transforms Ollie’s landscape completely. The piece follows a turning year, each season marked by immersive sound design blending field recordings – birdsong, water, wind, breath – with instruments and live sound.
Drawing on the iconic Green Man myth, Fieldfare gathers audiences round the campfire to retell it through a queer lens, where folklore is a living commons and old stories help navigate questions of ecology, identity, and belonging today.
We are using the wonderful opportunity given to us by CPT to stage an R&D of the script and our concepts, a sharing of what we found over a week’s exploration – so far, some crazy sound samples, movement work and summoned gods. You know, the usual.
How did you/Fallow get involved with Right to Roam?
I first got properly involved in the Right to Roam campaign in August 2022. A bunch of us painted ourselves in woad, dressed up and bussed down to the 12,000 acre Engelfield Estate near Reading to stage a peaceful trespass under a huge ancient oak: dancing, singing, eating apples brought by someone from a community orchard, advocating for greater access to the countryside (only 8% is publicly accessible in England and Wales, which is pretty dire). I remember the ground was littered with nos canisters from a celebrity’s birthday party the night before (they’d hired the whole estate), winking through the parched late-summer grass. I think I still have one somewhere.
I stood up and read a poem, and the next day someone from the central campaign texted me asking if I would be happy to come and read one at another trespass in Sussex. I did, and they kept asking. Working with them has been the gift of my creative life—it’s taken me from Dartmoor to Yorkshire, from private parks in some of the wealthiest parts of London to massive, recently enclosed estates in Gloucestershire, writing poems for performance that travel through the voices of local folklore, local history and the ghosts that lodge in every landscape. Old Crockern, Jenny Greenteeth, an abandoned mattress on the banks of the River Roding (shout out to the River Roding Trust). I’d end up writing these huge, many-voiced poems that meandered across the page.
It’s also been an opportunity to see what art’s place is in politics. Of course, all art is political, but it has taught me how to use it as a tool, a way to underpin a movement, to tell stories around a political cause that carry it, hopefully, into people’s hearts.
How did you develop this show, and how did you get into the folk horror space?
We are very much still developing it – it’s changing all the time! Fallow, too, is a new enterprise, and so we have the real pleasure of being able to figure out who we are and what we want to say. The show’s director, Amara Heyland, and I have just been joined by a sound designer, Jack Clearwater, who has completely catalysed the show’s DNA. I’m sure we’ll meet more wonderful collaborators before this project is out. We definitely want to. Fieldfare is a first step on the path for us.
We’re having a real renaissance in folk culture in the UK at the moment, particularly in music – you have artists like Lankum and Martin Carthy being nominated for the Mercury Prize, promoters like Broadside Hacks selling out the South Bank Centre, theatre companies like Nettle Soup making region-specific folk theatre, the new Morris sides and singing circles springing up around the country, brands like Ffern putting money into the projects like the Black British Folk Collective through their foundation and, of course, the Right to Roam campaign using folk-spirits like Old Crockern to articulate the voices of the land. People are being called back to these customs and rituals and melodies that are in a closer alignment to the natural world, and, as that natural world is immolated in the climate crisis, this is essential. It may seem like a conservative impulse, but I think it’s the opposite.
Folk culture is fundamentally inclusive, though it’s too often claimed by the more conservative and reactionary forces in our culture to keep people out. Now, though, people are realising that, yes, there is a heritage that needs to be cherished, but that it is a living thing that can be used to grow and tend to community, one that not only includes the people around you, of the past and the future, and the more-than-human too. It belongs to everyone.
As someone entangled with the folk scene and the Right to Roam campaign, this play is part of that. How do I make theatre that feels like a Lankum song? How do I explore myths and ideas of Englishness and Britishness and their ties to landscape and place? How do I do that in a way that reclaims them from the far right? Fieldfare is a way to ask those questions.
I’ve often found folk horror to be a frustrating articulation of people’s alienation from rural places, from nature and the people who live lives entwined with it, whether that be farmers, reserve managers, villagers or people living in off-grid woodland eco-communes. It can feel like a convenient box to put anything that has the faintest tint of the green or the ghostly to it, a way to ignore the complexities of story, culture and ecology.
I grew up hearing ghost stories, seeing ghosts, seeing odd things in the woods. The uncanny was just a part of my daily existence, of my family and the people around me, so when I first encountered folk horror, it felt strange to me that people would put so much effort into abstracting what in my experience felt very tangible.
On the other hand, I think genre can be a great way into new worlds for audiences. It closes the distance, a way of welcoming people – here’s something unfamiliar through a familiar, genre-labelled door. I’m mixing metaphors here, but genre, in this case folk horror, is the shared language that lets us tell the story. It allows an audience to encounter things like folk spirits, animism, the idea of a living ecology, rural lives, through a metaphor that they understand and (hopefully) delivers those things in an entertaining and exciting way. It’s a useful way, too, to dramatise the climate crisis: what vengeful spirits awaken when we neglect nature?
Your show is both multimedia and protest poetry. How do you bring these strands together?
We’re still working it out, but I think it’s something about creating an ecology of ingredients, a web that makes up a whole. Finding a way for sound design, archive footage, poetry, monologue, movement and song to all feel like seamless articulations of the same thing, and doing this without giving an audience something too intense, finding the colour in it, the light and the shade. We are very much at the beginning of finding this language, but we are finding it and that is very exciting.
What’s next for you?
We will apply for some funding for an R&D of Fieldfare in Autumn this year, so that we can bring a designer and movement director on board and share a more fully realised version of the piece with venues. Then the aim will be Edinburgh ‘27, if we can somehow find the money.
Otherwise, I was lucky enough that my play, Corpselight, was shortlisted for the Bruntwood, Papatango and the Theatre503 prizes last year, so I’m trying to get it on somewhere.
I’m also working on my first collection of poems – about meat, masculinity, desire and folklore in rural places. Watch this space.