Out Of The Margins – Good Chance Theatre & Christie’s

Good Chance Theatre are hosting an online auction of some of the greatest scripts, annotated by their playwrights, in a bid to raise money for displaced artists. Their event, Out Of The Margins in collaboration with Christie’s, brings marginalised people and their stories into the light with the clever double meaning referring to the authors notes around the text.

Good Chance is full of theatre-makers and theatre-lovers with a huge interest in how plays are made, from writing processes to the writer’s anxieties, which sparked the idea for the auction. The project has been a year in the making, reaching out to various playwrights, and has resulted in 60 taking part. Many of the scripts were annotated post performance, giving a rich insight into the life of the play; the rehearsal process, the writer’s thoughts and favourite lines, and their observations of an audience’s reaction to their work (Suzie Miller noted that Jodie Comer had the audience in fits at a specific scene in the annotations in Prima Facie).

Ten of the lots are on display. These include Dennis Kelly’s handwritten, first edition of Matilda, a Jerusalem script with original props taped in-between the pages, a new screenplay for Mr & Mrs Jones written by Richard Curtis (Love Actually), Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, detailing artistic differences between him and director, Patrick Marber, Mark Rylance’s Anthony and Cleopatra script with his annotations, thoughts, and directions as an actor and Mean Girls, The Musical with quirky doodles and annotations of its iconic characters.

Philip and Hannah from Good Chance offer to flick through the pages if you would like a closer look at the notes. Both were highly articulate, passionate and knowledgeable, eagerly sharing their thoughts, feelings and personal connection to the work and to the cause of the charity.

Co-founder of the organisation and Co-writer of The Jungle, Joe Robertson recounted the “almost accidental” creation of Good Chance. At the Calais Border in 2015, Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy set up a dome to function as a theatre, which bore witness to the stories of over 10,000 people from 25 different countries. Following the camp’s eviction in 2016, they met up with those who made it past the border, supporting them and developing the play through workshops. The Jungle has since toured worldwide, with audiences seeing parallels with their localities.

I also had the opportunity to interview Tonderai Munyevu, playwright and performer, who has donated an annotated copy of his play, “Mugabe, My Dad and Me”.

https://www.goodchance.org.uk/stories/out-of-the-margins

The auction ends on 6th October.

Reviewer: Riana Howarth

Reviewed: 21st September 2023

 

Interview with Tonderai Munyevu

What was your interest in being here today?

Well, I think it’s very important that we make people aware of the state of the world in which we live, in this case, it means what is happening with refugees and migrants. I’m from Zimbabwe, I was born in Zimbabwe, so it’s always nice to do anything that highlights the lives of people who are migrants and refugees.

What were your intentions for writing your play?

I think initially it was to process a kind of grief that I was under, which is that my father had died 10 years before I wrote the play and my country had been run by the same president, some say a dictator for my whole life up until then, and suddenly, he was disposed so that was very triggering for me around where I belong and who I was without a father, without a president and so I just really struggled to try and process that, and that’s how the play began.

What were the challenges with merging the personal with the political? What was your journey?

Oh, it’s really hard. It’s really, really hard. I thought initially I would just write a play about how the president had changed over the years from someone who was heroic, and really praised for his efforts in getting independence without people, but also how he had managed that transition when Zimbabwe was initially considered initially very successful up to when he was disposed, when he was a pariah. So, I thought just his public speeches would do the job, but I quickly realised that actually the relationship that I had with him as a citizen, and my family, as a small microcosm of Zimbabwean families and what we had gone through because of him, it felt really important to give the context. I mean, sometimes with writers, you have to be a bit braver than you would be in your typical life, because you are creating a piece of work that a lot of people will engage with. So I think that was just very, very difficult, very personal and very hard, but very thrilled that I was able to push through and do it. And also, I was acting and that was hard because the writer was far braver than the actor.

So, in terms of your annotations, how much of them are you as a performer and as a writer? Do you wear two different hats?

I think I’ve mixed them up, as writer and performer because I’m mindful that the play might be performed by somebody else another time which I really welcome, I would want that to happen actually. So I have done it from the person who has written it and performed it.

 

Interview with Joe Robertson

You mentioned that the play has been evolving, and is more relevant now than it was before, but is there anything you would adapt for the current climate?

We always talk about this. There’s a tension between whether you, you know, preserve that initial integrity of something when it first came out or you change it and evolve it and when we were in the Jungle, people would never have crossed the channel by boat. It was just not – it was deemed impossible, you know, it’s the busiest shipping lane in the world. But now, that is the route and I think we do think about how we would adapt and evolve it in a way, the play speaks about what we’re all facing now: How do we live together? Can we live together? Can we welcome each other? Can we understand each other? I think in a way, those central questions speak just as profoundly today as I hope they did then. So I think allowing it to speak in that moment, in that time is probably the best thing.

But I suppose when we say it evolves, it’s whenever we have a new cast member who brings their own experiences, their own stories, their own particular unique experience. Then, those have to absorb into the play. It’s not a play that you can just cast an actor and say, okay, you stand here and you move here, and now you cry. It’s so real and so immersive. We invite the audience into an Afghan cafe, we sit together and there’s naan bread, there’s food, there’s chai and it’s not like theatre, its like something else. To do that, its not like pretending. It’s walking a line between reality and fiction and for so many of the actors in the show, it’s representative of their experience because they are themselves people who’ve been forced to flee their homes, they’re settling in a new place or their parents did, or their family did. So, I think we’re trying to capture that tension, it’s like theatre shaking hands with the world.

Do you find that you change the writing as they bring their experiences in and change how the characters express perhaps to how you might’ve first envisioned it?

Yeah, definitely. Especially in the early workshops. You’re shaping, you’re finding, and it could be as simple as a line doesn’t sound as right in one actor’s mouth as it does in another, or it might be single lines or a single word. Certainly, when we were building the show, it was so much. We were responding to the actors, how they sounded, how they felt, their experience of it and that collaboration was really powerful. That was what it was like in the real jungle. People were arriving from 25 different countries, all forced together in one place, trying to understand each other without language, sometimes. And these are countries sometimes at war, sometimes with tension, and art just became this really great way of bridging those divides. The subject is so politicised right now. People think certain things about certain people or certain policies or whatever. And actually, art is this really important thing, right in the middle of it. Yes, all of that’s important but at the heart of it, it’s just human beings, like you, like me, like all of us and that’s why I find that all of these writers have taken part.

What was the energy like when you were actually there?

It was basically one of the worst places on Earth, because it wasn’t a UN refugee camp so it wasn’t official. So there was no infrastructure by any state or big organisation, it was all Grass roots organisations, individuals, so it was dirty, it was dangerous. But there was an enormous sense of community, people from all over the world meeting for the first time, an enormous sense of solidarity, people helping each other, supporting each other. There were a lot of children on their own, and people looked after them. They built a women and children’s centre, there were churches, there mosques, cafe’s, restaurants,  people sought to create structures to build life. It was incredibly powerful and moving and humbling, and made everybody work harder because without the government, without the UN, people had to do it themselves, and if those people could do it in a place with nothing, there’s hope for all of us. We can welcome each other in a better way and there’s something to learn from this. So, it was terrible, but it was also quite exciting. In the theatre, it was some of the best nights at the theatre I’ve ever had. It was cold, and it was windy, and people were being beaten up by the police every night, but they would come into the space and sing and dance and tell stories, so it was so electric every night. I’ll never forget it.

It’s a very inspiring way to start a charity, and the idea behind it.

Yeah, very accidental, very sort of – just responding in the moment, every day and at the end of it, it was sort of like – maybe there’s something important in this idea that could carry on. And we’ve since worked all around the world, running domes like that. But also, we have a poetry collective that happens all around the country, in Sheffield, in Coventry and that’s sort of the same. We bring a group of people together who would never normally meet, like an 89-year-old guy from Sheffield with a 21-year-old girl from Syria and everyone in between, writing poetry together and over four months getting to know each other. And then at the end, they do this big performance and they’re performing the story of Sheffield today, in all of its glory, in all of its diversity and they’re best friends by the end of it, they’re families. And they still meet up and they write poetry together, so there’s a similar thing there.

Were a lot of the people interested in arts and writing and stories before, or was it something that came about during the process?

It’s a great question, I think a lot of the people we meet were artists before they fled their homes so my friend Mohamed Sarrah, He’s a musician, he was a musician in Sudan and carried on writing music in the jungle and performing music and now he performs in the jungle around the world. And he’s still a musician in this/his country. But some people are kind of activated by the experiences they’ve gone through, they’ve gone through such difficult, sometimes traumatic, sometimes complicated experiences and actually, in that journey they find a need to talk about them to tell their stories, to express them, so we meet people everywhere in between.