Escapes, which opens at the Corpus Playroom on Tuesday, is a devised piece. As drector Emma Wilkinson puts it, this means that “this time last week we didn’t have a play”. Unlike traditional plays, the scripts for devised plays are the result of a collaborative effort between the directors and the cast. Wilkinson and dramaturge Helena Middleton worked with the actors, Laura Batey, Marika MacKennell and Martha Bennett to put the play together.

“We asked to do this play at the beginning of term,” says Wilkinson, “because there’s no other point where people would have been able to devote as much time as the process demands.”

Wilkinson and Middleton decided on the theme of ‘escapes’ over the summer. They were interested in incorporating physical theatre into the piece. “Helena has previous experience with physical theatre,” says Wilkinson, “and thought there was a lack of it in the Cambridge theatre scene. I thought it was an interesting way to make the play more free... Physical theatre and devised theatre both require the actors to get rid of any barriers between them and the audience. Without a script it can become very exposing”.

With this interest in physical theatre in mind, they chose their theme partly because physical movement and progression are central to the idea of ‘escaping’. They initially thought about setting the play in a prison, but something quite different emerged from the collaborative process: “We have three independent women escaping from particular things in their lives”. These characters are middle-class Londoners who are still seeking escape, but not from the prison setting the directors had envisaged.

The first step in the intensive process of devising the script was to give each of the three characters a role and a function in the plot. The directors ran workshops that would allow the performers to develop their characters and give them a back-story. “I wasn’t keen to dictate personality traits,” Wilkinson explains. “I wanted to give them as much freedom as possible so that they could make their characters as effective as possible. They’ve all chosen characters they could relate to in some way, but they’ve all been ambitious. No one has chosen a safe option.”

They rounded off the day by discussing what had happened in the improvisation process, and deciding what worked and what did not. “It was really important to us that the process be as collaborative as possible, but the difficulty with making it entirely free form is that you never get anything done. You spend all your time discussing, so there are times in devised theatre where the director needs to take on a more traditional role,” admits Wilkinson.

Afterwards, the performers went away and wrote monologues for their characters, which were used as starting points for group scenes. They also came up with their own movements that were put together and choreographed by Middleton.

“We’re not feeling the pressure yet, but the memory game is daunting for the performers,” says Wilkinson, as the three actors are learning a play whose script they have only had for a few days. “But what helps in devised theatre is that they know their characters inside out because they built them. It’s a lot more natural”.

Wilkinson adds, “We wanted to create a show that had a different feel. Corpus has this great tradition of tight, visceral theatre, but we wanted to break with that a bit. The process meant that the actors had time to play around, be open to more ideas and be themselves.”