28 Jun A Sense of Direction – New Old Friends

She was a second-year drama student at Bath Spa University, working part time at The Egg, Theatre Royal Bath’s studio space for younger audiences. He was a recent graduate of Bretton Hall, putting on a show with his friend. Their meeting was the start of two intertwined journeys – one of a company, New Old Friends, and the other of the couple that runs that company, Heather Westwell and Feargus Woods Dunlop.

“We met in the summer of 2008, when New Old Friends did its first show, which Feargus made with his friend Josh Golga,” explains Westwell. “We got together that September. Feargus was doing these cabaret nights and comedy sketches and I just joined in the fun. We’ve been working together ever since.”

“The night that we met I rang up my best friend and told them that I’d just met someone who was perfect,” adds Dunlop. “It didn’t feel weird to work together once we became a couple. It was just an excuse to spend more time together, and we were having a lot of fun putting these cabaret nights and comedy shows together.”

Fourteen years on from their first meeting, Westwell, 34, and Dunlop, 36, are still a couple – they got married in 2012, and now have an eight-month-old daughter– and New Old Friends is still going, too, having produced a series of successful shows for family audiences, and toured them around the country. Westwell and Dunlop run the company together, as actors and co-artistic directors.

“We are pretty good collaborators by this point,” says Dunlop. “We’ll have an idea for a new show. Heather gets excited about the world of the show, and I get to work concocting a narrative and coming up with a script, which Heather then gives me some robust notes on. We used to get a third-party director in after that to stage it with us. Since the pandemic, we have been directing stuff ourselves.”

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Both Dunlop and Westwell hail from the south-west. Dunlop grew up in a small village outside Bath and fell in love with theatre through attending youth groups in the city. Westwell was born in Bath, but grew up in Devon, and found her passion for performance through school drama lessons. When it came to choosing what to pursue professionally, though, both were faced with a dilemma.

“I played a lot of sport when I was younger, and when I was seventeen I had to choose between a development contract to play rugby or studying at drama school, and I chose the latter,” says Dunlop. Westwell’s choice, meanwhile, was between drama and music. “At first I chose music and was set to move to London and be a bass player, but I changed my mind,” she remembers.

The show that changed everything for New Old Friends came after Dunlop and Westwell had met and married. It was an acclaimed adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s The Falcon’s Malteser, which the duo first toured in 2014, then staged at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe, establishing their reputation as producers of family-friendly, genre-based comedy capers. Everything they do, explains Dunlop, is about entertaining audiences. “We don’t have a higher purpose than that,” he says.

A series of successful murder mysteries followed – 2016’s Crimes Against Christmas, 2018’s Crimes On The Coast, 2019’s Crimes On The Nile, 2020’s Crimes Camera Action, and current show Crimes On Centre Court. Dunlop and Woods left their day jobs to focus on New Old Friends full-time in 2018, rented regular rehearsal space off a local farmer near their home in Frome, and built both their company and their lives alongside one another.

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Running a theatre company while in a relationship does have its difficulties, though. “The thing that probably causes most problems, and which I am most guilty of, is not being able to separate church and state,” says Dunlop. “It’s not being able to separate work life and home life. We will be on a lovely walk or something, trying to relax, and I’ll start talking about New Old Friends when Heather would rather talk about anything else.”

“A lot of good ideas have come from those conversations, to be fair,” adds Westwell. “We were away for our anniversary in 2018 on the English Riviera when we had the idea for Crimes On The Coast. There are times, though, when Feargus starts chatting about the company, and all I want to do is sit on the sofa and watch Gogglebox.”

For the most part, though, emphasise both Dunlop and Westwell, being both a company and a couple is brilliant, especially when times are tough. Just as it has for many other organisations who operate a small-scale touring model, the Covid-19 pandemic has proved particularly problematic for New Old Friends.

“We are an independent, commercial theatre company,” explains Dunlop. “We have never had regular funding. Every show has been funded by the success of previous shows, and we are very proud of that. Before the pandemic, we were about to rent out more space to use as offices and storage. Since the pandemic, though, things have been a lot harder. We have done two tours since theatre reopened, and audience numbers are half what we were doing pre-pandemic.”

The inevitable consequence of selling less tickets on tour for a commercial company like New Old Friends is increased uncertainty about the future. There was, says Dunlop, a very real possibility that current show Crimes On Centre Court would be New Old Friends’ last. Thankfully, he adds, the company has figured out a way forward for now, but both he and Westwell were grateful to have each other to lean on when the outlook was unhappy.

“We have lots of friends in the industry who are single, or whose partners work in other industries and don’t understand how theatre works,” Westwell says. “We feel so lucky that we can share the worry with each other. If one of us has a wobble, the other one is there to always offer support and sort things out. We go through pretty much everything together.”

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Heather Westwell and Feargus Woods Dunlop were talking to Fergus Morgan for SDUK.