Training for Trauma: How the Theatre Brings the Real World to Life

Andy Thompson speaks with Victoria Edgerton, owner of For Real UK, who use dramatic arts as a platform to deliver highly immersive training and experiences in Corporate Resilience and Emergency Planning exercises – helping the Emergency Services, including Police, Ambulance Service including HART Teams, Fire & Rescue Service, Mountain and Lowland Rescue organisations, and HM Forces personnel, bring training to life.

How did For Real UK come into being?

It is certainly not a typical story! I wanted to be a mechanic when I was in school but, due to traumatic events I experienced when I was younger and becoming pregnant with my daughter at 16 I felt that was no longer an option as I lost confidence in myself. One of the police officers that looked after me asked me how I could build my confidence. I thought enrolling at the Performing Arts at college instead of being a mechanic was the solution. I studied to degree level and then went into teaching but in my eyes, I was a really bad teacher of Performing Arts! I put too much of how I wanted my students to act onto my students. I wanted them to start finding their own way of how to act.

During the process of becoming a teacher, I was invited by the Police to help them with their training by reliving my experiences. Month by month, it was getting harder to keep on going over the same things for the purpose of their training, but I still thought it was really important, so I asked the Officers if I could make my statement into something more creative: something that did not actually happen to me, but similar. It worked! They got a lot out of it. At the end, I could say “this was not what actually happened, but this is what happened to me”. It was much easier going through that process.

Shortly after, I went to a charity event with the Fire Service and I met Doctor Mark Forrest, Cheshire Fire and Rescues medical director and Director who runs ATACC Group. I began working on the ATACC course and all of CFRS trauma training, offering teams of actors and creating traumatic scenarios. Things just spiralled from there. I set up the company For Real UK. “For Real” was our code word in case anyone was actually getting injured in a scenario! That became the name of the company. Thirteen years on we are still going well.

Can you describe the nature of your training?

We engage in corporate resilience and emergency planning exercises for Blue Light services, government departments, education establishments and more.

We conduct in-house training – either a specific event or training that lasts a few weeks – with the single purpose of adding realism with actors.

Firstly, I discuss with clients what a creative could do to help achieve a specific goal. They may want the public to know something, so we would discuss creating adverts, or scripting theatre pieces into schools or workplaces. I script that for them. I will then design a package of training to bolt on with the company.

When the clients’ own personnel are playing the casualties, the element of realism is lost, because you know who it is. My teams will not only take on the roles of the casualties, but they will also take on roles of people within the teams. If they were training the Ambulance Service, for example, some of them may be in Ambulance service uniforms, carrying Ambulance service gear, so that the client can learn from the actors in all senses of being in the scenarios with them.

We do a lot of the major incident training and testing. We have been brought in by different services when they are testing procedures for the UK Home Office, to identify what would work best within specific scenarios. For example, if they were doing a decontamination scenario, what procedures work better than others? We have done a lot of terrorism training within different shopping centres and workplaces, schools, and colleges, so that they can test what standards they have already got in place. If the training identifies flaws in the process, we can organise and create further training around processes that they would like to put in place. We also do Red Team testing – seeing how we can get past security and identifying whether people are applying the standards that a company thinks they are.

We work with the Emergency services when they are undertaking multi-agency training, and individual training also. We train with people who are going out to hostile environments. We have worked with Frontier Risks and their HEAT and medical training. Anything our clients want to teach we try to bring it to life for them in a way that they may not necessarily have thought of.

It is certainly not the normal route into this sort of training environment! How did you develop the contact base?

Networking! Starting off with the likes of ATACC, and people visiting the training courses saw us at work. Frontier Group has been a really good route too especially at their networking events. It is simply about being seen doing the work. Clients have always seen either me or my team at a job and asked how they could have that within their service. We have been so fortunate that all of our work comes through word of mouth. We got a lot of contracts working with the Fire Services because we took part in the Firefighters’ challenges. All the different services were competing, so naturally some teams wanted to train with us, ready to go into the challenges!

What is the structure of your business? Who do you work with?

I started off as just me and hired freelance actors that I have taught, worked with, and networked with. We have had jobs all over the world, so I have spoken to people over the Internet who have auditioned and then they have done a job for us that we could not have flown over for. It really is just people I have met along the way who have that same passion as me – they do not want to go into TV, they do not want to go into theatre, but they like this style of acting.

You provide the actors, but the scenarios are given to you?

Only sometimes. Sometimes they will stipulate what we have got to do, for example, an RTC (Road Traffic Collision) with eight casualties. I will come up with how events have taken place and the scenarios behind it. With multi-agency exercises, I tend to write scenarios with them so that everybody can take all the different jobs into account in a joined-up fashion. I think that is missed a lot of the time. Everybody has got different goals that they are trying to achieve in their training and sometimes other roles are not considered, but I am extremely fortunate to see this as we train separately with agencies so know what they need for their training.

For example, when a Firefighter goes to an RTC, his goal is very different from that of the Police. Although they all want to do the best for the casualties involved, there is a lot of evidence gathering that the Police have to consider, which may get moved from another service. By involving ourselves in scenario planning we can “open eyes” to what each service needs to achieve when they go to an incident, and have to work together, putting differences to one side when they are working in these scenarios together.

You are based in Manchester, England. Where do you deliver your training?

We work wherever the client wants us to work. I go to everybody’s training grounds or I will find a training ground with them. If there is a certain scenario they want, we can find the right environment for them to train. We have worked internationally and with different services, forces and organisations who have viewed our work online.  We have had actors working in the Middle East, in Australia, New Zealand and in the States. We have worked a lot in Europe too, of course.

What trends have you seen and how do you see the market developing?

Recently there has been lot of mopping up going on. There were a lot of different training companies established, especially after the Manchester Arena attack, but many clients were not happy with their services because things were being taught incorrectly, or insufficiently. A lot of corrections had to be made. Equally, change is always occurring within medical training, or renewing First Aid practices for example. That is always quite challenging because people feel like they have already done it before and do not really want to do it again!

Over the last couple of years, we have seen an increase of incidents online. We were asked to design scenarios to train people to look out for signs of what was going on with children online and how to keep kids safe. Also, a proliferation of strange games that resulted in children committing suicide and self-harm. This is really tragic.

On the flip side, we had some funny experiences recreating some strange injuries sustained from extreme selfies – and we can only smile, that people would actually do these things!

There is a lot more training that can be done if people would just listen to the reasons behind these training needs, and for it not to become a big argument over people thinking that others are being suggestive towards certain people or beliefs. We have considered lone wolf terrorist attacks, for example, and profiling people, which always presents a great discussion with the psychologists (that attend some of our jobs due to the nature of scenarios) as to whether you can ever really know someone or what they are going to do because you have got actors who are showing that you can actually trick someone.

That has been a great topic. The more realistic we can make it, the more in-depth we can go with the scenario. When people go into the scenes, they do believe it is real and the reactions it elicits are real – the fights that we have had, occasions when we have to save ourselves from people being physically sick, and seeing the trauma affecting someone who never suspected they had trauma in the first place – holding a knife up to someone and they’ve reacted badly, for example.

That is the side to it that really interests me – the more realistic you make your training; you can actually see what training is required and whether that is something to do with the public or that is something to do with the people who are actually doing the training and participating themselves.

Do you find that people can approach such training a bit blazé but, perhaps, by the end, they have a different view?

Certainly. We have had so many people claim, “we have done this roleplay before and it does not work, you can’t make it like an actual incident”. Of course, we cannot make it like an actual incident, but we will make it as close to it as possible by doing my performing arts. There’s semiotics of theatre, for example, where your sounds and smells and touch – everything you can consider come into play to make something so real – it is terrifying! In some scenarios, there have been men and women who have cried, or approached us to make sure we actually are OK mid scenario. There have people who have had to sit out for twenty minutes then ask to speak to the casualty that just “died”.

We give people food for thought – things that they would not necessarily think. We are not teaching them how to apply tourniquets or bandages. We are teaching them the human element of how they approach things and providing opportunity to reflect and understand how they might react in a situation they face.

You offer a very differentiated product from the norm for training services!

I never planned to be a boss! I was not particularly business oriented. The way I always look at it is that there are similar people doing similar work. One of the girls I have worked with is amazing – Lindsay, from Trauma FX – I do not see her as a competitor. She is someone who has been in this industry, who can teach me things and we can bounce ideas off each other about how we both coped in this industry. And we have worked alongside each other on jobs.

I explain to clients, “this is what I can provide to you, and if you want to get volunteers in, as you may have done before, that is fine. Just let me speak to them and talk them through what we do and try and get them to join in the realism with us and not feel giggly or not feel scared

It can be quite traumatic, especially on major incidents, when people put volunteers in who have no idea what is going to happen. I try to pair up my team with some of the volunteers. It frees up someone from the Services having to look after different teams – as my team are looking after other people within the scenario.

Yes, there are others doing what we do, and I never try and compete or badmouth any of the companies to get more work. I just like people to see what we do and see if that can fit in with them or even if they wanted to take style off us, that’s okay, so long as people get what they want from the training.

How have things evolved in the way you deliver training?

In terms of moving forward with my training, I am currently looking at collaborating with a great company called RiVR. I believe VR is the way forward. If done correctly, you could get some really good training. VR is a very personal training experience. There are a lot more companies that have started this last year, and so I think the training will evolve a lot more and we will see a lot more change by the time the “new different” starts.

The challenges you have faced must have been significant?

When I started, I had no idea about business and I genuinely worshipped people who knew how to be a boss from the start. At the start I simply learned through mistakes!  The biggest challenge, I think, is being a twenty-one-year-old girl walking into a very male dominated environment saying, “I want to do this”. When they say, “who are you?” I will always say I am an actor. I will not say “boss”, or “I provide training”. Getting people to take me seriously was quite difficult. Even now I still say I’m an actor as it allows me to assess a person’s opinion of me from the conversations that follow.

As time has progressed, getting people to change culture in the workplace and getting people to listen to their teams has been a huge challenge. Being on the outside, I can walk into a company and the teams, the management, everyone, will identify the problem and what we need to do to me, individually. If they actually sat down together and spoke like they do to me, they would realise that they are all saying the same thing – often they are not talking because of internal politics and power structures within organisations. Being in a position where I can hear everybody’s point of view and not being able to do anything because I am not actually part of those organisations, that has been a big struggle.

It has been difficult juggling being a Mum and having a company, but she is nearly 20 now, and in the Fire Service.

What frustrates you about the training environment and the market you operate in?

Loads! What makes me angry is that people simply do not spend some time to collaborate instead they dismiss or even denigrate companies in favour of themselves. Why not find out why? What are other providers actually teaching? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How can you help them? Why not work together and get some sort of continuity on the training? We could go in as an actor for the same type of course that people are trying to teach. Yet they teach procedures so differently, instead of joining up. If the relative strategies work, why not join up? That drives me mad.

Having the perspective that you do, could you act as the conduit to bring companies together for a united training strategy?

That is what I want to do now, with the risk qualifications I have gained: to show people how we can conquer any sort of risks that are appearing within the companies and maybe get them to look at things in a different light.

It makes a difference in training itself because we could be involved in training days and sit there for about four hours with lots of PowerPoint, but you could teach that in a practical sense. From a teacher’s point of view, you can see the different types of students in the room – who wants to do something practical; who wants to be writing; who wants to be reading, and so on. You can incorporate that into training if you just look at the types of learners that you will teach and adapt with that.

In my experience, Forces personnel, especially, prefer to be involved in practical training rather than sitting and watching something. People think that we lose them because of the content. We do not, we lose them because of the delivery. The content is amazing. It is just how you put it to your audience.

I think the red tape stops a lot of evolution within training. People do not want to suggest things because it might put the job at risk, or they might put a good working relationship at risk if they want to change something that has already been done. If people did not think there would be repercussions, I think a lot more people would speak up within organisations.

What advice do you have for potential clients looking to improve the training experience?

Meet the people you are bringing in as a provider and trust your gut feeling. Know that these people are going to represent your company.

You have got to have confidence in the people that you bring in. Do not get drawn into people who have a lot of popularity online – with some it is great, but some do pay for marketing and for “likes” and amazing reviews. So, meet them. See what you think of them. I often like doing micro teaching for the people who are going to be bringing me in. I’ll run a scenario for them, and they put themselves in the student’s shoes and if they get something out of it, that’s great, then we can work together.

I need to know that you have got as much confidence in me as I have got in your service as well, even being an external provider. I have still got to know that I am OK with what companies are teaching and what their standards are as well. Do not just do something for the money because the money is not always going to be there. You go for the work that you are confident you can teach.

I would be more than happy to say to a client of mine here are three people that I have worked with in the past contact them ask them about me, my team and our work. Don’t just take my word for it. Do not go off what you say online about me, call people who have worked with me. Do not be scared to ask people for examples of your work. Try and build up a bit more of a picture it needs to be right.

Who stands out for you in the training world as exemplary?

There are so many! Frontier Risks spring immediately to mind. I cannot fault them. I have watched their company grow over the years and that doesn’t stop the guys from being supportive and approachable. Their network and the calibre of teachers on their SRMC course are second to none.

Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service push their training to the limits and also the well being by allowing their amazing staff to voice their support groups.

Beyond these great trainers, it is important to say that we need to make sure that people are looking after the teams throughout this experience we are having with COVID. Really pay attention to how people are coping throughout it. Since undertaking the Frontier course, I have thought long and hard about resilience. Please don’t mistake resilience for fighting every day to get through. At some point everybody has to stop and just see how they can help each other, whether that is through training or whether it is just talking. Behind all these uniforms, are humans. I would really invest time in teams because they are the ones who actually make the company/organisations successful.

Victoria can be reached on victoriaedgerton4@gmail.com , or visit https://forrealuk.com/  

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