Preview: Northern Exposure
April 16, 2009
Simon Walker guides you through this year’s season of new plays by northern writers at the WYP with the help of authors Boff Whalley and Tom Wells
The West Yorkshire Playhouse’s seventh annual Northern Exposure season is now imminent. A programme of new writing from “the North” (meaning, you’ll be pleased to hear, chiefly God’s Own County), it supplies a platform to promising local writers, and therefore complements rather than overlaps with the WYP’s commissions to more established local playwrights like Mike Kenny. This year’s collection, the largest yet, consists of three productions by northern theatre companies, one of which premieres at the WYP, and a double bill of short plays by three writers that each took its So You Want to be a Writer? course (SYWTBAW) in 2007.
Beginning with Leeds-based company imitating the dog’s new production Kellerman (click here to read Ron Simpson’s interview with itd’s Andrew Quick about the show), the season continues with this year’s double bill. The two short plays, both directed by WYP literary associate director Alex Chisholm, are Dom Grace and Boff Whalley’s It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow and Tom Wells’ Me, as a Penguin.
It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow by Dom Grace and Boff Whalley
As local anarchist pop collective Chumbawamba’s longstanding guitarist, Whalley is a seasoned writer. However, his shift into drama was relatively recent. “I write lots of other things as well and always have done, but I think that theatre is something where there is this fantastic place in Leeds where people are encouraging new writers to do something in a way that isn’t there for any other kind of writing,” he explains. “I don’t see any point in just sitting in your bedroom writing poetry – people have to see it. The Playhouse has been brilliant for that.” He compares this to the experience of pitching his two plays for radio to the BBC, which is “like being a salesman – trying to sell ideas to people that live in London. One person in London makes all the decisions about what gets on.”
After meeting on SYWTBAW, Whalley and Grace developed It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow through a series of master classes with WYP associate artist Colin Teevan in 2008. Set in Grace’s hometown of Middleton in 1940, it follows two brothers aged 12 and 15 who decide to take a trip to Hull in the hope of finding an orange, so that they can give it to their mother to cheer her up. Whalley tells me that the story is not only true, but “was in Dom’s family (and has) been passed down. When Dom told me the story it wasn’t as an idea for a play, but I just thought, ‘What a lovely story’, so we ended up writing about it.”
The play is partly, he says, about the excitement of leaving your hometown unshackled for the first time. “I think that, with the exception of those in a few cities, people tend to grow up thinking, ‘I’m going to get out of this place’,” he suggests. “Usually going to college is an excuse for people to leave their hometowns and find out what the world’s like. It’s a fantastic rite of passage and a lovely period of time to write about – that idea of moving away from what you know is so full of tension and fear.”
However, while it is a life-affirming piece, It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow’s wartime backdrop is anything but token. Indeed, when I ask Whalley how distinctive to Yorkshire the play is, this is the aspect of it that he emphasises: “As Dom said the other day, people’s experience of wartime was probably different here to in London. Much of our idea of what Britishness is derives from the War and Vera Lynn and jingoism and the Cockney, East End experience, but in Middleton it wasn’t like that. People were angry about what was happening and felt a bit separate from what the country’s leaders were saying and aggrieved that there were still people in London having big banquets at which they ate lovely fruit that nobody else was allowed because of rationing.”
Me, as a Penguin by Tom Wells
Similarly Wells, who hails from Kilnsea in east Yorkshire, has chosen to set Me, as a Penguin, near Humberside. Also developed through a series of master classes with Teevan, the play is the first by the 23-year-old Cambridge graduate, who names Leeds’ Alan Bennett as his favourite playwright. It follows a young man’s departure from his job in a knitting shop in a remote east Yorkshire village to stay with his pregnant sister and her boyfriend in Hull while sampling the city’s gay scene.
Though generally laconic, Wells is particularly delicate in commenting on the details from his own life that it harnesses – perhaps very justifiably. “My mum got annoyed about the Battenberg,” he says. “She said, ‘God, everyone will know it’s me’. I think that was the only thing she remembered about the reading, but there were about 12 people there, none of whom she’ll see again. I don’t think she needs to worry about the cake. But yes, I do nick people a bit.” The reflection prompts a question from Whalley: “Does the woman with a limp who goes into the shop exist?” “Yes,” Wells laughs. “She goes to my dad’s church.”
Queen Bee by Margaret Wilkinson
After the double bill, the WYP hosts Tyneside’s North East Theatre Consortium, which is a partnership between New Writing North, South Shields’ The Custom House, Hexham’s Queen’s Hall Arts and Darlington Arts Centre. Its item, Queen Bee, begins with a psychiatric nurse’s acceptance of a job as a live-in carer in a house in Northumberland and finds her, her employer and the housekeeper unnerved by the presence of a mysterious figure loitering outside. It was written by Margaret Wilkinson, author of Kneehigh and Northern Stage’s Pandora’s Box, and is directed by Wils Wilson.
The Moon, The Moon by Clare Duffy, Chris Thorpe and Jon Spooner
The programme concludes with a visit from touring Unlimited Theatre’s The Moon, The Moon, produced in association with Leicester’s Curve Theatre. Written by the Leeds-based outfit’s three founders, Clare Duffy, Chris Thorpe and artistic director Jon Spooner, it’s a story that straddles two alternate realities: one in which the protagonist is standing by a shore after making Christmas dinner two months late, and another in which he is imprisoned in a cellar wearing someone else’s pyjamas. Having suffered a great loss that has sent his faculties awry, he has to make a choice between accepting the comforting overtures of the Moon and the more sinister ones of his captors.
Further events
A number of additional events at several venues in West and North Yorkshire will accompany the main programme. These will be performances of Victoria Levay’s Kidnapping Agatha (4 May, The Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate); Amman Paul Singh Brar’s Still Alive (7 May, WYP); Anna Clarkson’s There’s Loads of ‘em in Burnley, Thais (8 May, WYP); 15 new five-minute plays by alumni of SYWTBAW (9 May, WYP); Phil King’s House Martin (15 May, location currently undisclosed); and Nikolai Khalazin’s Here I Am (16 May, Leeds city centre). There will also be a discussion on performance with some of the writers and performers participating in the season (16 May, location currently undisclosed).
Kellerman is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse from 22 to 25 April; the Northern Exposure double bill is at the WYP from 28 April to 2 May; Queen Bee is at the WYP on 5 and 6 May; and The Moon, The Moon is at the WYP from 13 to 16 May
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