May Days hits the stage!
On Friday 15 June the full cast of actors met up for rehearsals of May Days, and I arrived at 11 o'clock, in time for their second run-through.
It was slow; it was rough; but there was also clearly something very special emerging which went beyond what I had written. A poem not written for the theatre, not a verse play in other words, is intended to be read, and able to be read over and over to discover the multiple layers. A play functions best through dialogue and incident.
What the director, Simone Vause, had seen in the May Days, was that it could also be presented as dialogue and incident, and so she came up with the idea of staging it.
She was right. This rehearsal translated a series of monologues into vibrant interchanges between a range of different characters. It brought out the voices of the many which are stifled by the power of the few.
The five actors have taken on the challenge of the multiple layers and used them to give body to the characters they play. Over a number of one-to-one sessions with Simone, they have each worked on their sections, and were finally putting it all together.
The lion’s share of the lines still goes to the Narrator, played by Roger Gartland, a very experienced actor who is here responsible for setting the dynamic within which the others perform. Despite the fact that the actors were only asked to do a rehearsed reading, he wanted to perform a fully-learned script, and so set a standard for the others, which they have risen to, though they will all have scripts to hand
Tayo Aluko, a Nigerian-born actor and singer, takes on the major role of The Victims of the Grenfell fire, and a video of him rehearsing a part of that is included here. Having come all the way from Liverpool for this half-hour performance, he had only just started rehearsing, and so he will definitely be reading his part.
Karen McCaffrey has long experience of working in small-scale theatre, where you never know what difficulties you may have to face as directors try out new ideas. As a result, she was the most quickly at ease in the complicated space we are borrowing for the performance, designed for use in The Playground Theatre’s show Shirleymander. She plays the major role of The Helpers among others.
Tiannah Viechweg plays multiple roles, as the major role of The Missing has been divided up, but her performance includes playing the figure of Power. A young black woman, she told me that she never gets to play powerful roles, and so she really valued this opportunity. She makes the most of it, I can tell you.
Shane Chester, a young black man, takes the major role of The Artists, a section based on grime music and lyrics, with their gritty attitude to life. He has to perform without music, as we were not able to get a grime musician to create it for us, but he does it with feeling.
Lastly, Simone wanted a piece of inspirational music to go with the poem. Tayo suggested Gospel Plough, also known as Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, and also suggested that I write a couple of new verses for it, as many have before, including Pete Seeger. It was wonderful to watch Tayo teaching the others to join in the chorus and to hear him sing the verses in a real gospel style, including my new ones about Grenfell.
It is a shame that this is a one-off performance, since so much talent is making this an unforgettable event. I feel sure that anybody who misses it, but knows somebody who did not, will be hearing about what they missed for some time.
