[Contains spoilers]

It’s always exciting seeing a brand new play, particularly when it’s a playwright’s first. The anticipation of whether it’ll be entertaining, have a unique voice, be pertinent, exciting and bold, is always huge – the disappointment then all the greater if the work doesn’t deliver.

The latter scenario is absolutely not the case where Mucky Kid is concerned: put simply, it is absolutely riveting. Given the heavy subject matter – the play explores the 36 hours of freedom Maggie Radcliffe enjoyed after breaking out of prison, where she has spent more than half of her life – you could be forgiven for thinking you were in for a bleak night at the theatre. Instead, Sam Potter’s debut play is fresh, full of life and highly intriguing; Mucky Kid will have you leaning forward in your seat from start to finish.

The play’s structure is immaculate: at its opening we meet Mae (Sonya Cassidy) and Naomi (Pamela Dwyer), thrilled by their new-found freedom and determined to make the most of it. Upon meeting Jason (Adam Loxley) and Derek (Rob Witcomb), they indulge in a night of hedonistic fun, which Mae (Maggie’s pseudonym) dubs “the best night of her life”. However, back in prison, being grilled by the unimpressed staff, we quickly learn that Mae is a stickler for lying. “Use your words,” she is constantly instructed, though the more she articulates her experience, the less we wish we knew. And indeed, as the play goes on to revisit the events of Mae’s escape, we learn more and more that not only is she still a danger to the outside world, but that it is as much of a danger to her.

With the story altering each time we visit it, becoming more dubious, more disturbing and desperate, it becomes clear that Mae might be able to escape the prison walls, but never what she did. This repetitious structure works brilliantly to encourage the audience to keep questioning the truth in what they are seeing and what they think they know, while also imitating the nature of memory itself: how we all spin our own narratives and remember events selectively in order to avoid admitting to more uncomfortable truths about ourselves.

The writer handles the subject matter and story deftly, with a deep sensitivity, allowing Mae to be a simultaneously sympathetic and unnerving character, brought to life with verve by Cassidy. Indeed, the whole cast of Mucky Kid is remarkably strong, with a gripping moment being the unsettling scene where Mae befriends 10-year-old Paige (played by the thoroughly convincing Serena Manteghi). It’s both incredibly sad to see how naive and young Mae is when paired with Paige, while nonetheless making for tense watching given our knowledge of Mae’s offence – killing another girl when she was only 10 herself.

Potter’s writing highlights the complexity of criminal minds, of neglect and abuse, with this multi-faceted play suggesting there is no simple answer and no situation which is simply black or white. We come to learn that Mae is incredibly vulnerable, in many ways a victim herself, making the piece all the more tragic. Indeed, Mucky Kid comes to a devastating head when Mae is pushed by her counsellor to explain what really happened when she was alone with Paige. As she searches for the truth in the tangled story of her escape, she instead stumbles across buried memories about her original crime and is overcome when she realises that this memory is definitely real.

I could continue to wax lyrical about the play – the ingenious set design by Nik Corrall reminiscent of body bags and crime scenes, the careful and detailed direction by James Farrell, and more. But in light of Maggie being constantly told, “use your words”, I won’t mince mine. This is a brilliant play. Go and see it.

Mucky Kid is playing at Theatre 503 until 7 December. For more information and tickets, see the Theatre503 website.

Lisa Carroll

Lisa Carroll graduated from University College Dublin in 2012 with a B.A International in English. She is also a playwright, script reader and director. @lisa_carroll46

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Sat at a table in an empty office floor space, Tom Morton-Smith mulls over his latest play script. The actors are taking a lunch break and the floor is divided up with squares of black tape, a few odd items of furniture and, in one corner, and old-fashioned gramophone. The play is called In Doggerland, and to hear Morton-Smith tell it, it’s his best one yet. It’s a story of family and tragedy, and four people brought together by coastal erosion and an organ transplant. “It’s essentially about grief, family and identity… there’s been an accident and the daughter of one of the characters has died. And so her heart got transplanted into Marnie – who had a problem with her heart for her whole life and has now come to find the family of the donor.”

According to Morton-Smith, the play he’s written wasn’t exactly the one he was planning on. Inspired by the psychological effect that heart transplants have one people, he began writing but couldn’t quite get the script to work. By chance, he saw a documentary on coastal erosions that are causing houses and villages to literally fall into the sea and the idea stuck with him: “The image of a family home crumbling of the edge of a cliff and into the sea and being washed away… I thought that’s a damn good metaphor for something!” But instead of scrapping one play for another, Morton-Smith decided to stick with his first two characters, saying he “really liked their dynamic so I decide to take them out – transplant them out – of that play and put them into a new one.”

Morton-Smith hasn’t always been writing plays. In fact, he came into the world of theatre as an actor after studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art – playwriting was never more than a hobby. That changed in 2007 when his first full-length stage play Salt Meets Wound debuted at Theatre 503 and the actor found himself becoming a writer. “Suddenly with that play it was going though all sorts of literary departments, it got me an agent, I was in development with a theatre… that seemed to be doing good things for me and slowly the whole writing thing replaced the whole acting thing.”

Clearly Morton-Smith has no regrets about his shift from performer to scriptwriter. I ask him how he’s finding playwriting so far, and his enthusiasm is unmistakable. “I love creating a world! And when you start collaborating with designers and actors and seeing what they bring to it, you can have what had previously just been in your head come alive in front of you… I love the days like this where you can just be talking through the script [with the actors] and filling in all the spaces. It’s a fun thing to do – create a universe and tell a story through that.”

Of the worlds he has created, that of In Doggerland seems to be one Morton-Smith is particularly proud of and he describes it as “a relatively small play but one that’s very beautiful”. Then, looking slightly ashamed, he admits that when the play is shown he’s hoping for tears in the audience. At its heart In Doggerland is a family drama – a play about the intricacies and pitfalls of family relationships, and it’s the story of two siblings, something a lot of people will be able to relate to. According to Morton-Smith the play is meant to be “thought-provoking and entertaining and moving and all those good things that you’d want from a piece of theatre. If there are a couple of laughs but at the end the audience is in tears then I will have done my work.” After the play opens in the Lowry Theatre, Salford it will then be touring to New Diorama in London and on to another nine theatres everywhere from Liverpool to Exeter and Halifax.

Morton-Smith claims that his best tactic when writing is to get it all done first thing in the morning. His strategy is to get up and get it all written down while it’s all he’s thinking about – before he’s even showered or had breakfast. As he says, if he gets everything done in the first portion of the day, the rest of the day is left to “sit around and worry about the choice of a single particular word in a particular sentence”. As well as being an early riser, Morton-Smith is also a multi-tasker and he likes to always have several plays on at different stages. Although he used to write focusing on a single piece at a time, apparently that means that “you’ll only have a play on every five years… so that’s not the way to go!”

When asked what his best advice to young playwrights would be, Morton-Smith quickly says that there are no set rules for any one person and that there are “as many trajectories to being a playwright as there are people who want to be playwrights”. That said, it always pays to be practical: “Get a day job you don’t hate, because you don’t know how long you might be doing it.” Finally though, he stresses the importance of deciding what sort of thing you want to write, staying true to that and making sure that “what you’re working on is what you want to be writing.”

Conori Bell-Bhuiyan

Conori Bell-Bhuiyan is a student and arts and culture blogger from Manchester. She wants to end up working as a journalist somewhere warm, and she loves anything artsy, off-beat or slightly wacky.

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The belief that theatre is mostly London-centric is not new. If the topic is a garden covered in snow, it most definitely has been trampled into slush. But it does not stop me getting frustrated as a North-West-based theatre maker, that on a popular arts website as I write this, there are 179 opportunities in London and only 19 in the North West. I get frustrated that in 2011 there were 30 Arts Council England projects scrapped in the North West region alone, but only 33 in the whole of the South (outside London). I get frustrated that I travel to London to audition for roles that are in northern theatres. And I get hugely frustrated that anything outside London is given the name ‘regional’ theatre as if it’s not good enough to be considered nationally.

But does any of that actually mean that making theatre in the North West is difficult?

Why do we ‘do’ theatre? It isn’t for the money. It’s not for fame. It’s not for the job benefits. For me, it’s to tell stories, to entertain and stimulate a group of people. Do I need the help of a London agency to do that? No. Do I need ACE funding? No. Do I need someone to create an opportunity for me to get involved in? No. We can make theatre ourselves. Anyone with an idea and an audience can create a piece of theatre. Anywhere in the country.

But I’ve touched upon something there – audience. With less funding we need an audience who will pay. I think this is the North’s biggest battle. London has a theatre community – from the tourist ogling at the West End, the fringe enthusiast at 503, or the moneyed supporter of new writing at the Court, London has an audience. It was argued by Andrew Haydon and Ramin Gray at Theatre 503′s All Change festival, that London attracts (and thus mostly panders to) a “consumerist” audience. Therefore the work created is easy to swallow and relatively unstimulating. Although I listened intently and with great interest to their pains, my empathy was significantly lacking. They may not have their ideal audience, but at least people want to see their work.

On a Friday evening, The Royal Exchange in Manchester struggles to sell out. In the past three years, I have seen the top tier of the auditorium open once. Neil Darlinson, ACE’s Acting Head of Theatre, stated: “The further north you go, the more reliant on the public sector it gets”. There doesn’t seem to be an audience for North West theatre. This issue comes right down to the grass roots – it’s not just the main houses which are struggling, grass roots theatre is struggling too.

So what’s to be done? Is it fair to bemoan this situation? If a company spends four weeks in rehearsals, invests their hard earned money and receives nothing in return, are they entitled to bemoan a lack of interest? Or should they accept that North West audiences want something different?

It’s ridiculous to say there are no people in the North West who will pay to watch good theatre. We’re just not giving them what they want. Instead of regurgitating Miller, Churchill and Pinter, let’s do something new, fresh and exciting. Let’s shake things up. Let’s stage new writing. Let’s get out of theatres and into the streets. Let’s listen to what the people want and give it to them better than they ever could have imagined.

Essentially, let’s stop bemoaning North West difficulties. The agents don’t want to come yet. Neither do the reviewers. And the government don’t see the North as financially equal to the South. So let’s prove them wrong. Let’s make theatre that has people cheering/crying/laughing so loud in the North, that they can hear it in the South. Because if we do that, then the agents, reviewers and funders will think twice about staying only in London. Making theatre isn’t hard in the North West, we just need to do something invigorating.

That’s what we’ve tried to do at Fresh Loaf Productions. We stage film and theatre that is challenging and thought-provoking, bold and brave. Our upcoming monologue, Hand Over Fist (written by Dave Florez) is the story of how a woman with Alzheimer’s tries to remember her first love. Yes, it’s deeply moving, but it’s also funny, light hearted and, at times, terribly crude. Because an audience doesn’t want to be lectured, they want to be entertained. And from The Stone Roses to Oasis, hasn’t the North proved we can entertain better than anywhere else in the world?

Joe Mellor is an actor and director with Fresh Loaf Productions in Manchester. He is currently directing Hand Over Fist as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival (2-4 July at Town Hall Tavern).

Photo: The Royal Exchange Theatre. Photo (c) The University of Salford under a Creative Commons Licence from Flickr. 

Joseph Mellor

Joe is an actor and director with Fresh Loaf Productions in Manchester. His last production 'Stacy' was selected as a National Student Drama Festival finalist, where he won Spotlight's 'Best Actor' award.

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When a playwright chooses to direct his own work it’s always a risk – but with Real Circumstances’s production of Our Share of Tomorrow at Theatre 503 in Battersea, to say it has paid off may be a slight exaggeration.

Dan Sherer’s play, set in an Essex fishing village, tells the story of Cleo (Tamsin Joanna Kennard), a young girl whose mother has just passed away, her unconventional friend John (David Tarkenter), who she has picked up for companionship, and Tom (Jot Davies), her mum’s old flame who can’t let go of the feelings he had for her many years ago. The play passes at speed between different moments in time from Cleo’s first encounter with Tom, back to John and Cleo’s chance meeting in a hospital waiting room, to cross sections of the time Tom shared with both Cleo and her mother. The bonds between all three of them fray as they all battle the demons of loss, desperation and where the lines blur between right and wrong.

Kennard shines in her role as the mournful yet inquisitive Cleo, and Davies’s bumbling portrayal of the simple, understated Tom is heart wrenching to watch. Tarkenter does seem to let the side down, though, with his over emotive and extremely exaggerated acting style that appears to jar with the other, much more relatable, characters.

Some blame for Tarkenter’s underwhelming characterisation must go to Sherer’s script, which lacks cohesion. The dialogue can be very dubious in places and the lack of a climax in the storyline is a loss worth mourning. The decision to include singing in the production was well made, breaking up the wordy conversation and adding a lighter layer of entertainment to the piece. However, the rhythm section of the performance whereby the characters of John and Tom used boxes and bags as drums to back Chloe’s beautiful vocals was maybe a step too far, turning an emotional and true to life piece of theatre into the encore from Stomp.

James Cotterill must be commended for his beautiful wooden set design, converting one of the cosiest theatres in London into an intriguing piece of scenery. As soon as the audience enter the playing space they are relocated automatically to the emptiness of Tom’s life and the ambiance of a seaside village.

Overall, Our Share Of Tomorrow is an interesting piece that has all the components for a captivating piece of theatre. I just can’t help but feel that some parts of the production fell short, creating a slightly confusing but nevertheless heartfelt performance.

Our Share of Tomorrow is playing at Theatre 503 until 6 July. For more information and tickets, see the Theatre503 website.

Liam Blain

Liam is from Edinburgh but is currently completing his final year student at Royal Holloway University of London studying Drama and Theatre Studies. As well as writing for a number of other publications he is the Artistic Director of theatre Company Out of Town Productions which specialises in contemporary issue based theatre. Liam's theatrical interests range from west-end musicals all the way to small contemporary fringe performances.

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