The last performance in this season’s current Centre Stage programme was a musical drama about a Victorian fairground.  FairGame theatre company developed the play based on interviews with a traveller family who told them about incidents from their lives.  Playing multiple parts the small cast managed to create the impression of a whole menagerie of wild animals, facinated and at times intimidating crowds, rival performers and a variety of acts.  They also gave a vivid sense of what it was like to be a child or young person living as part of a performer family.  The play recreated a sense not only of the fairground but also of a life before travel and television when knowlege of animals, different human characteristics and crime was more fragmentary and disturbing.  The play challenged us to think about our changing attitudes to animals, disability and difference.

Last Friday’s Centre Stage performance was a play: Happy Jack by John Godber.  John Godber is a well known playwright, originally from a mining family (this play is said to be based on the life of his grandparents), and with a longstanding involvement with the Hull Truck Theatre Company.  The play told the life story of a Yorkshire couple – Jack, a miner, and Liz his house proud wife.  We were given an overview of their life from courtship to retirement and then given vignettes of its highs and lows.  The epithet ‘happy’ was ironic.  Jack was at times angry, violent and withdrawn – but surprisingly also wrote poetry (including while his wife was giving birth!). 

The tone was bittersweet:  at times movingly painful, at other times making the audience laugh out loud.  The cast from the Ratatat Theatre Company played it brilliantly holding this tension which made the play feel a believable life story.

This new production from the Shifting Sands theatre company was an ironic tribute to film noir. There were lots of references (most of which I am sure I missed but for the record Rebecca, The Maltese Falcon, North by North-West, The Postman always rings twice … and stretching the genre a bit – The Seventh Seal?). There were flash backs and forwards, bits that didn’t make sense at the time, the glamorous flirtatious dame, the evil villains, the interior monologue about unexplained events and pending doom … This was combined with the promised clowning in the form of slapstick moving and collapsing doors and screens and mime in the form of the absence of props and effects for car chases, post office sorting office – and axe murders! The cast played multiple parts with enthusiasm and wit … including rounding up the audience from the cellar when they were ready to start the second half!!

An extra event in our theatre programme brought to us as a result of Gerald Box’s generous sponsorship.  Mikron theatre (in their 37th season) performed their new play exploring the past and present of the Cooperative Movement, incorporating their usual mixture of humour and song.  This was a play within an (imaginary) film.  We saw the group discussing how to construct the film and then enacting scenes and commenting on them.  This encouraged the audience to reflect on what they were being told – and gave plenty of opportunities for comic moments as the cast commented on their performances and had fantasies about the exotic locations their story could take them to. 

We learnt about  the birth of the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844 when weavers opened a food shop at the end of the day with a focus on high quality, low priced goods.  It was interesting to learn that they banned credit, aware of the problems debt caused for workers, as well as the birth of the more familiar ‘divi’ whereby profits were shared in line with purchases.  The movement grew in part because of the hostility of other businesses.  They objected to their prices being undercut and refused to supply the coops – leading the business to expand into wholesale, shipping and agriculture.

The play also covered the birth of self-service supermarkets, the stagnation and later regeneration of coop stores, the recognition of the role of women members, the wider links to current interest in fair trade goods and Sean Connery’s first job!