Ayesha Casely-Hayford | Actress blog

Trust – if you don’t have trust, you have nothing. If you don’t have trust it just won’t work.

It is understandable that people like to keep working with people that they know and trust. We like to recruit from a college or uni that we are familiar with, from a cultural background we have encountered before, from a face that we recognise, from a personality type we believe we can understand. It’s a short-cut, because getting along is not guaranteed when you begin new relationships with strangers.

I’m in rehearsals for a new play “With You Always”. We are creating in workshops, discovering our characters and the relationships between our characters some of whom are strangers to each other, others who are family. We’re working out our alliances, we’re trying to understand this new play.

Strangers – a piece of new writing is a very special stranger. It has not been in the world for very long. It is not necessarily recognisable, it has not been tested for its strength, but we trust it and believe in it  – we want to give it a chance because if we stop trusting these new writing strangers, our culture will never grow. We will never be able to see and share our vision of the world today. If we can believe and trust in it, when new writing strangers have been born, it’s a chance to take a leap of faith. Any chance to take a leap of faith is healing and strengthening for the soul. It means believing in the unknown and having courage, which makes us stronger.

Trust. If you can trust strangers, it is good for creativity. If you can trust strangers, anything is possible. To trust strangers is a skill we are born with but gets damaged and even lost through bad experiences in life. Learning from past experience is important but each new stranger deserves a fresh start, to be given a fresh heart. So a chance to practice staying open is golden. Our showcase of With You Always in Oxford at the Simpkins Lee Theatre on 19th May, will be the reveal! Being able to trust strangers is an ability actors need. I’m having a solid time with our With You Always cast – the trust is there and this means the play can live. With trust in strangers, this play will work. When applied to life, we’re on to a winner.

Ayesha Casely-Hayford | Actress blog