Adlyn Ross and Haley McGee in Made Visible, a play about race and identity at the Yard Theatre. Photograph: Caleb Wissun-Bhide
In much younger, more pretentious days, I remember writing a short play as part of my A-Level coursework that was a conversation on a park bench.
Made Visible, which opens at the Yard this month, is by coincidence exactly that (although I’m sure similarities end there).
Based on a ‘real encounter’ Pearson had in Victoria Park with two women of Indian origin, it is a ‘meta play’ that aims to humorously explore issues of race and identity.
Playwright Deborah Pearson, 33, an East Londoner originally from Toronto, uses the conversation between the three women to take aim at white privilege, asking the white writer to take accountability for being white.
“At first it appears to be naturalistic, a conversation between three women of different ages and backgrounds, but it then starts to question itself and becomes more like a play about the attempt to make that play, or the ethics of making that play and whether or not one should,” she says.
Although one of the characters is a playwright called Deborah, Pearson says it is important to retain a degree of ambiguity over whether the character is actually her or not, or even whether the encounter actually happened.
“It’s clear it’s a composite of me,” she says, “but would it really be possible to really stage something that really happened anyway? There would always be something about the truth of that situation which is flawed by trying to funnel that experience through one person’s perspective.”
A former Royal Court young writer and co-director of experimental theatre outfit Forest Fringe, Pearson describes much of her work as ‘contemporary performance’, solo performances that are usually autobiographical, so writing a play for actors is a departure.
Her ambition is for the play to be part of a wider conversation about lack of diversity and a lack of representation in the theatre industry, an issue that has come to the fore in Hollywood recently with OscarsSoWhite.
“We’re all trying to see this play as an emperor’s new clothes moment of pointing out how come so many writers are white and what does it mean. Just because someone is white and in this dominant position it doesn’t make them objective.”
Pearson realises that making a play with a basis not far removed from academic discourse could be a challenge for audiences expecting an evening’s entertainment, and she has a solution – humour.
“The thing is whenever you want to talk about something that’s a sensitive topic politically, a good way of doing that is by being entertaining and funny,” Pearson says.
“I hope the play’s quite funny but I hope that the joke’s in the right place. There’s a great term about punching up rather than punching down so I really want the jokes if anything to point towards the discomfort these things bring about and then that these are things that need to be addressed.”
Made Visible 15 March–9 April The Yard Theatre, Queens Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN theyardtheatre.co.uk
Soldiering on: Lines at The Yard Theatre. Photograph: Ben Hopper
A surprising fact little trumpeted is that 2015 is the first year since the start of the First World War in which British troops are not engaged in warfare.
But what are the implications for the army’s 81,700 full-time service personnel, and what does it mean to be ‘at peace’ anyway? These are questions explored by Lines, a new play that has opened at The Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick.
The play focuses on four young recruits who join the army for different reasons. The audience witnesses the boys transform into soldiers, but in a time of peace these new warriors play out their days cleaning their guns and ironing, a situation that soon becomes combustible.
“There’s a line in the show that says peace is just a gap between wars, that peace is bullshit,” says the play’s director and Artistic Director of the Yard, Jay Miller.
“We rationally try to want peace and desire it, but blimey look at what happened in Ankara – at a peace rally. This show tries to explore that really human need to be violent, regardless of who we are, where we are or what we’re doing.”
Miller, along with the writer Pamela Carter and the creative team, visited barracks and spoke to soldiers whilst preparing the script. Some of the soldiers, Miller says, were deeply disillusioned and bored and have subsequently quit. Following these visits they felt confident enough to create characters that were true to real life.
“Sometimes we literally took lines, sometimes there was just a sense of someone,” Miller says. “What we did do explicitly is spend time researching the process the army takes young recruits through, what they do on day one, what they do on week one, week two, etc. And we’ve been very, very careful to mirror that process on stage. All of these things that you’ll see the soldiers do on our stage, they do in real life as well.”
But how to make a play about violence with it being violent itself? Miller assures that Lines is not the theatrical equivalent of an action movie –a Rambo Goes East, if you will.
“It’s about an everyday violence,” Miller says. “A lot of male relationships are formed on a bed of violence, because they take the mick out of each other, so violence is represented through those relationships that are formed on stage.
“We see the characters become very aggressive, and although there is physical violence it is used very sparingly. Then what we do is that we fire the audience’s imagination to make them imagine and feel what these boys do.”
Promising explosive techno and angelic choral singing, Lines is The Yard’s third in-house production, following The Mikvah Project in February and last year’s Beyond Caring, which was transferred to the National Theatre. How important is it for the Yard to be making its own work, I ask.
“It’s really important,” Miller replies. “It’s just as important to define contemporary theatre as to be responsive, and I really believe we’re defining what is contemporary in theatre today.
“We want to be pushing theatre in new directions and working to try to figure out what tomorrow might look like.”
Lines is at The Yard Theatre, Unit 2A Queen’s Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN until 21 November. theyardtheatre.co.uk
A fancy members’ club in Soho is a far cry from The Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick, so joining a select group for a preview of new E4 series Chewing Gum, adapted from a play first shown at the Yard, I felt a little out of my comfort zone.
“It’s like we’re royalty,” whispered someone, as we were led into a private cinema, free drinks in hand. That someone sounded not dissimilar to Micheala Coel, the series’ writer and star, who was due to answer questions afterwards.
Named one of the six best young playwrights in the UK by WhatsOnStage, Coel’s career began when she wrote and starred in a semi-autobiographical monologue called Chewing Gum Dreams that in 2013 became the Yard’s first play to be transferred to the National.
That play, about life on an East London estate, has been snapped up by E4 and has since morphed into a six-part coming-of-age comedy about a young woman who really should have come of age already.
“The play goes from extreme laughter to tears, but this is a comedy so I had to make a completely different show,” explains 26-year-old Coel.
In the play Coel’s character, Tracey Gordon, was a sharp-tongued 14-year-old living on an estate in Tower Hamlets with much charm and potential but few expectations. But the Tracey we meet in the series is now 24 and facing a different set of dilemmas.
Tracey’s religion is holding her back from gaining life experience; she lives in a strict Christian household with a sister whose idea of fun is to stay at home and play Ludo. Tracey seems to have missed out on the teenage kicks part of growing up – but is determined to make up for lost time.
A slightly embarrassed Coel describes the two episodes shown as “sex central”, an accurate enough description, though she later stresses that the show tackles the world of work, drugs, family life and relationships too.
As far as the sex goes though, there’s everything from a threesome to nose-licking, and a fair few other things besides. Tracey’s first port of call in her quest is to Google the word ‘sex’, but what she learns from the internet doesn’t stack up in the real world. “My face is not to be sat on,” her celibate boyfriend tells her brusquely, while her best friend Candice’s dating advice to “channel your inner slut”, proves similarly disastrous.
In a similar way to Lena Dunham’s Girls, sex is present as a fact of growing up rather than as something to titillate the viewer. In that programme, and in Chewing Gum too, the relationship between on screen characters and their real life equivalents isn’t exactly clear. Are Coel’s characters based on people she knows and, more pointedly, is Tracey based on her?
“I think everyone is made of a few people I know, including Tracey,” Coel tells journalists at the screening. “It could be if I was on a really long bus journey and somebody was on the phone that they’ve somehow been put into the mixing pot of every character.”
But when we speak later, Coel talks more about the parallels between herself and Tracey.
Chewing Gum is set on an estate in Tower Hamlets, similar to the one where Coel herself grew up.
The cast of Chewing Gum
“It was a strong mix of mainly immigrants,” she says of her upbringing. “Everyone was very poor and as much as our cultures clashed we were wonderfully united by economic circumstances.”
Then as a teenager, Coel, like Tracey, was “wrapped up in cotton wool”. Her mother, she says, was strict and wouldn’t always let her go out.
But instead of going down that well-trodden path of rebellion, Coel ended up devoting herself to the church. Becoming a devout Christian for her meant celibacy and “not talking to guys”, something many hormonal teenagers would never consider. Looking back on that time, Coel recognises that she “put growing up on pause” but on the plus side she sees a lot of positives for her development as an artist.
“I started performing pretty much when I became Christian. I had a big old Pentecostal conversion, was given a bible and I wrote a lot of poetry. I guess that kind of faith can make you do crazy things and that was pretty much the first crazy thing I did was I walked into a bar and I asked if I could read a poem.”
These days Coel is a writer who revels in lampooning religion and who is keen to talk about sex and promote ‘normal’ women’s body images on screen (apparently she wanted nudity in the show but it was vetoed). How did this outspoken writer emerge?
Coel describes her ‘second conversion’ after winning a scholarship to the Guildhall School for Music and Drama. Suddenly she found herself among a cohort of fellow performers who seemed happy without religion.
“I was learning from those people rather than trying to teach them anything. I’d been told all these things about ‘worldly’ people, then got to school and discovered they weren’t true. And also I didn’t really feel any need to tell people that they needed Jesus Christ because I didn’t think they did.”
Whilst her peers were doing their final year shows, Coel opted to go it alone and create her own piece, the 15-minute monologue that was the very first Chewing Gum Dreams. Then after graduating, Coel looked to put it on somewhere. She found the Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick, and applied to be part of their Theatre of Great Britain Festival.
“It was basically build your own set, do your own marketing and do your own producing,” Coel remembers. “So I went all around East London with flyers and Jay Miller who runs The Yard, he’s really amazing with scripts and was really helpful in the way I extended it. He really gave me strong bits of advice so I’m very thankful to him.”
After the rave reviews for Chewing Gum Dreams and a successful transfer to the Shed at the National Theatre, a series was commissioned. Coel had played a part in Top Boy, a very different Channel 4 series about East London estate life, but insists television was “never on my radar”. Clearly now that has changed, and Coel is currently shooting another E4 comedy drama, Aliens – from the producers of Misfits – in which she plays the lead character.
However, Coel certainly won’t turn her back on more stage work. “If the scripts are good then I’ll do the job and it doesn’t matter what kind of thing it is,” she says, sounding every inch like a drama school graduate.
Coel remembers the early days at the Yard, which may seem an age away but they were only three years ago. “I have extremely happy memories of performing there, as stressful as it was,” she says. “When you see people crying their eyes out or laughing and then looking like they’re satisfied. It’s the best, best, best feeling in the world.”
Janet Etuk as Grace and Sean O’Callaghan as Phil in Beyond Caring. Photograph: Mark Douet
During the pre-election ‘air battle’, zero-hour contracts were a hot topic. It is timely then that Beyond Caring, a play that peels back political rhetoric to reveal the realities of cleaners working in a meat factory with no fixed hours, has transferred from The Yard in Hackney Wick for a brief run at the National Theatre.
Designed to encourage a flexible labour market, zero-hour contracts force workers to bend over backwards to meet the whims of an employer. If you are young and lucky enough not to fall ill or on hard times – you might survive. But those in Alexander Zeldin’s play are the vulnerable, the poor and the sick.
The action follows three women taken on for a two-week job at a meat factory. They are bolshy Liverpudlian Becky (Victoria Moseley), timid Susan (Kristin Hutchinson) and Grace (Janet Etuk) who has had her disability benefit cut and has been passed fit for work despite having rheumatoid arthritis.
They join Phil (Sean O’Callaghan) a gentle giant type who buries his head in detective fiction and is on a treasured permanent contract, and manager Ian (Luke Clarke).
All the acting is strong but Clarke gives an especially good performance as Ian, the type of manager who thinks an extra 27p an hour and a university degree gives him the right to laud it over his subordinates with fascistic zeal.
He calls team meetings after punishingly long shifts (“I’m not happy guys”), prevents Grace from taking medication and watches porn on his phone all the while spouting an infuriating jumble of self-help clichés and managerial jargon.
Nothing happens, the days pass in a pattern of work and biscuit breaks. This lack of plot is consonant with the sense that there can be little progress for those forced to live in the immediate.
We learn little of the characters’ backstories beyond hints at private tragedy but again this is a reflection on the nature of their work, for how can human connections be forged on such inconstant foundations?
Tension builds as physical exhaustion and pent-up rage pushes the cleaners towards the edge. Grace’s muscles, pushed beyond their capability finally give in and she collapses over the huge concertina-shaped machine. Paste-grey water is sloshed frantically over stainless steel machines, but the stubborn smears of congealed sausage meat will not budge.
The cleaners are presented as ‘invisibles’ (Ian says the staff party will give them a chance to mix with the ‘normal staff’) but 2.3 per cent of the UK’s workforce are on zero-hour contracts. The barman at your local gastropub is probably on one, as is the Sports Direct cashier who sells you a bundle of socks.
What really shocks in this brutal piece of theatre is that legislation that values a business owner’s profit-motive over basic human rights has become so commonplace in modern Britain. Beyond Caring leaves the audience smarting – not just from the pungent smell of sanitiser but from the injustice of it all.
Beyond Caring is at the National Theatre, South Bank, SE1 9PX until 23 May nationaltheatre.org.uk
Oliver Coppersmith and Jonah Russell as Eitan and Avi in The Mikvah Project. Photograph: Mark Douet
The stage is a swimming pool, or more precisely, a mikvah, a type of bath used in Judaism for ritual immersion. The leads are Eitan (Oliver Coppersmith) and Avi (Jonah Russell), two young Jewish men discovering what it means to find and hold on to love. This brave and sexually-charged play from writer Josh Azouz and director Jay Miller, now at The Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick, is quite the spectacle.
Eitan is 17, navigating his way through hormone-ridden teenage years, and arriving at the conclusion that he’s fallen in love with Avi, a 35-year-old married man who’s trying for a baby. They meet at the mikvah to be spiritually cleansed, but it soon becomes clear they’re only there for each other.
Lighting makes effective use of the space in the theatre, the rippling water casting an eerie reflection on the corrugated iron ceiling. There’s a bravery in the staging and the physicality that transcends the small space, and brings the audience right into the mix.
Clever interplay between the two vastly different personalities makes for a highly enjoyable exchange of dialogue and the heavy weight of things unspoken. As Avi says, love is “all types of silence”. Wonderful casting really elevates this production from fringe theatre to a piece that could happily sit in the National Theatre.
Utterly immersive from the outset, the play dissects stereotypes and clichés – both of men and of Jewish culture. It meanders along a relationship between age, experience, longing, desire, admiration and duty, blending startling music with clever dialogue. It’s surprisingly frank and funny, focusing on young male anxieties. Eitan is eager and carefree, Avi has an obligation to his wife – there are very human exchanges of power and control as the two men try to find a place in which they’re happy.
Exploring the boundaries of desire, fantasy and sexuality, and informed by today’s Jewish culture at every turn, The Mikvah Project is a must-see production in the heart of Hackney Wick. Erotic, emotional, extraordinary.
The Mikvah Project is at The Yard Theatre, Unit 2a Queen’s Yard, E9 5EN until 21 March theyardtheatre.co.uk
Daniel Millar is Philoctetes in Stink Foot. Photograph: Bronwen Sharp
Suffering for your art may sound appealing, but in practice it’s rarely so romantic. Just ask the stage crew behind Stink Foot, adapted from Sophocles’s tragedy Philoctetes. Post-performance, these unfortunates are charged with cleaning buckets-worth of quicksand-thick black treacle from the stage of Hackney Wick’s The Yard Theatre; it takes nearly two hours every night.
It’s appropriate for a play that’s focused on suffering. The titular Philoctetes (played brilliantly by Daniel Millar) was stranded on the isle of Lemnos by his former comrades-in-arms when they could no longer stand the stench of his war-wounded, festering foot. Ten years later he’s every inch the betrayed lion, seething with resentment against Odysseus (Rosie Thomson), who gave the command.
When young, principled Neo (Joshua Miles) is enlisted to trick him back to the battlefield, the ethical dilemma at the heart of the story unfolds. Should Philoctetes’ suffering be dismissed for the greater good of the Greek war effort, or do we sympathise more with the personal justice he seeks?
Jeff James’s adaptation strips down Sophocles’ original to a three-actor show while seeking to foreground its emotive clout. After a slow start it’s largely successful, due to strong lead performances and a canny balancing of language, which veers between blunt slang, ear-piercing sonic assaults and more polished classical phrasing. Then there’s the treacle itself – a pleasingly messy, in-your-face representation of Philoctetes’ sticky situation and the raw pain he must endure.
Philoctetes rarely gets staged in the UK, and is something of an anomaly as an all-male tragedy. James’s interpretation injects a dose of revisionism, making Odysseus female and the ghost of Hercules an ineffective party-starter, while introducing some feelgood recompense for the slighted Philoctetes. While the humour is welcome, it does dilute the play’s tragic overtones, and therefore its ethical conundrums; perhaps a necessary choice for an adaptation that remains tethered to its ancient source rather than reinventing suffering for a modern audience.
Stink Foot is at the Yard Theatre, Queen’s Yard, E9 5EN until 13 December www.theyardtheatre.co.uk
