CHARGED WITH HISTORY: Sidewalk Theatre
The intensity of creating, improvising and performing with a group of close friends and compatriots sears up after fifty years. Son of a Gun expanded to become something we were part of, something we owned. It contained threads and fragments of all our lives, even if it ultimately focused on one person’s internal dynamic, generously contributed by Tash Fairbanks. The words had an important ring. They felt alive and true, of the moment. Somehow, this intensity carried the play – and us – through, though I’m not sure whether we realised its resonance or significance at the time.
And it was funny. John Burrows is an uncannily funny writer: funny because his wit jumps from the truth – and it carried within it all our own energies, hopes and anger as children of the sixties scrabbling to make sense of the world, express ourselves and make a living. So it became its own combustible force. It felt immediate, connecting us to our audiences in a vivid way. They certainly connected with us. Performances seemed to shake people up across the country and all over Holland.
As a character actor, I enjoyed exploiting the comedy inherent in both language and situations, embodying myriad characters from Liverpudlian prostitute to 16 year-old schoolgirl and working class mother alert to every faux pas made outside the safety of her own front room. We all became quick change artists.
Watching the play being performed and directed with a new cast 50 years later, the whole thing leapt to life, throwing up the same old human dilemmas: clash of cultures and expectations, desire to escape from the stultifying codes of family life, falling in love and the traumas of extrication, fighting for financial survival, for a voice, for a right to be seen, heard and valued.
I felt gripped by how these new actors embodied the characters and brought them movingly alive, so my identification kept shifting from the hapless Dave to Brenda, doggedly striving for autonomy. Perhaps it was because the actors were so brilliant at incarnating those roles that I was swept along in their wake. I think new audiences will carry on loving Son of a Gun because every word of it felt true.
How lucky we were to live through those vital, formative years and pour them into theatre. How lucky we were to have been supported in our creative and political endeavours by the visionary Peter Oliver. Against the odds, he turned a youth club at the Oval into a radical powerhouse for the arts. We owe him an immeasurable debt.