The Legend Of Ned Ludd

Written by Joe Ward Munrow

Directed by Jude Christian

LIVERPOOL EVERYMAN

The Legend Of Ned Ludd is the first of three homegrown productions celebrating sixty years of the Liverpool Everyman. Joe Ward Munrow, as a graduate of the theatre’s playwright programme, delivers a confident, \ exhilarating piece of theatre. This is a play about people, the work they do and the impact of automation. The story pivots around Nottingham in 1816 and The Luddites who sought to destroy the first machines of the industrial revolution as they witnessed the decimation of their working lifestyle as they had known it. In this production the workers/actors are at the mercy of a machine which randomly selects most of the scenes from a possible 256 permutations. The three actors on stage have to respond to whatever is thrown at them, necessitating quick fire moves through the centuries and across the globe.

The staging by Hazel Low has a suitably stark, industrial feel with the central structure containing the tubes through which flow the balls that determine scenes…a bit like the old National Lottery show. The bright blue and yellow is suggestive of IKEA and  the brown cardboard boxes of props and costumes relative to each scene roll down conveyor belts allude to an Amazon warehouse. Larger props rise up through the floor aided by the invisible unheralded workers in the pit of the theatre. As the scenes evolve through the production the numbers of balls in the perspex boxes silently grow and by the end of the play’s run may well overflow.

Tonight’s show opens in Detroit in 2016 where a multinational is slashing wages and staff are holding yard sales and fearing bad weather will render them unable to get to work as they don’t earn enough to repair their car. Next up is Liverpool 1985 where a painter and decorator tries to embue his apprentice with a sense of pride in a job well done. Paris 1844 shows Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels discussing the politics of labour and the human condition. Other vignettes include a prison in China where one inmate who is a writer has mysteriously disappeared, another alludes to a possible trans identity and his poignant desire to just be pretty. The enforced work is relentless and includes gaming to earn gold coins for the Prison Overseer…automation means these prisoners do mind breaking work unlike the old chain gangs who endured backbreaking labour. A school in Lagos 2018 has school children reflecting on a shift in history from BC to AD that is now about BI to AI that is After Internet rather that artificial intelligence.

Some  vignettes are more substantial than others but together they build a sense of the worldwide human experience. The THEN/NOW piece is very powerful where the rhetoric becomes robustly poetic and Reuben Johnson delivers this piece with real passion and an innate sense of beat and rhythm. The production is interspersed with pieces about The Luddite movement in Nottingham 1816 where the machine breaking is gathering pace and the risk to life for the protesters is becoming ever more real. The closing scenes are beautifully evoked and the final moments are perfectly pitched and incredibly moving. Each actor like a good team of workers bring their individual skills to the production and complement each other. The three actors play multiple characters that include Menyee Lai as an exhausted, keening prisoner to Shaun Mason as a despondent worker with limited options struggling to make ends meet and Reuben Johnson as an articulate working class man at the heart of the Luddite movement driven to suicide by cop.

Emerging from this production, work is suddenly everywhere from the words of the playwright whether composed with pad and pen or by fingers flickering across a laptop to the choreography on stage, the actor’s sweat and passion, to the staff at the Everyman lighting the stage or pouring the interval drinks, to the Uber driver  picking up theatre goers after the show, to the reviewer noting down their thoughts. Some work is poorly paid or unpaid, some is fair and some may well be obscenely overpaid. Work can bring satisfaction and a sense of achievement or simply be a means to an end or be enforced drudgery but by its very nature it can hopefully also help bring structure and give us an identity and autonomy. As the play gathers momentum one corner of the back of the stage slowly starts to fill with the detritus of used and discarded props from past scenes giving a subtle sense of our growing landfill problem from our throwaway culture caused by an increasingly mechanised world and a growing surplus of sweatshop workers desperate for and reliant on a pittance wage. If the eponymous Ned Ludd was here today and could access Google translate he would probably say Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Liverpool Everyman 20th April – 11th May 2024