Liverpool Everyman – Live Art Alive

Emmy Stonelake and Luke Sookdeo as Aster and Marc in Tell Me How It Ends at Liverpool Everyman.
Image credit: Andrew AB Photography

Written by Tasha Dowd

Directed by Gitika Buttoo

LIVERPOOL EVERYMAN

It’s the 60th year of Liverpool Everyman and fittingly the theatre is celebrating by looking forward and showcasing new work. Tasha Dowd is a graduate of the theatre’s new writing programme for young people. Her debut play Tell Me How It Ends celebrates and commemorates a particular period of social history that has often gone under the radar in the story of the AIDS crisis. Focusing on the late 80’s and early 90’s the plays looks at the work of the lesbian community who tirelessly volunteered their time; in many instances their blood, sweat and tears to support all the men in Liverpool dying from AIDS and related illnesses.

This is a meticulously researched play that is filled with period appropriate cultural references and references local clubs in Liverpool at that time. The belting soundtrack includes Whitney Houston and The Communards and local Liverpool groups such as Echo And The Bunnymen and The Christians. Books and films are also central to the narrative as volunteer Aster attempts to connect with Marc though sharing books like Misery, The Silence of the Lambs and watching movies such as The Bodyguard together.

This two hander has Emmy Stonelake as Aster who is a lesbian supporting Marc played by Luke Sookdeo who is HIV and on AZT drug cocktails as the hospital struggle to increase his T cell count. Stonelake really shines in this role giving her character an awkward, bumbling charm and a dry, sly wit. Her initially infuriating habit of always giving away the endings of books and films becomes a poignant metaphor for what is to come as Marc’s life is cruelly cut short. Sookdeo struggles a bit in the early hospital scenes which simply require him to be weakened and warily resistant to Aster’s help. As his character gets physically stronger the Sookdeo starts to hit his stride and Marc becomes more fleshed out as the duo become firm friends.

There is a lovely choreography to the scenes as Grace Goulding makes use of every element of the clever set design by Katie Scott. There is energy and flow to scenes that move from the hospital to Aster’s flat, Marc’s B&B to the disco and the really captivating cinema scene. The story moves from the unlikely pairing sparring on a hospital ward to them making a bucket list to make the most of Marc’s remaining life. For such a young writer Tasha Dowd has a light touch and manages to avoid a mawkish drawn death scene. Aster’s big final speech is genuinely heartfelt and impassioned but risks preaching to the converted.

In recent years there has been a lot more writing about this era and it’s impact as we grappled with the horror of HIV and AIDS. This production feels like filling in another part of the story of a particular group of volunteers and the people they supported. I worked on the telephone counselling lines in Manchester and helped organise the fundraising so I remember the tears, the rage, the fear and despair and the laughter. It was an extraordinary time and should never be forgotten. Tell Me How It Ends evokes the era extremely well and is as much about learning how to live on our own terms as it is about preparing for death in a way that gives an individual some autonomy.

Liverpool Everyman 12th – 22nd June 2024

Menyee Lai, Reuben Johnson and Shaun Mason in The Legend Of Ned Ludd at Liverpool Everyman. Image credit: Marc Brenner

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.

Menyee Lai and Reuben Johnson in The Legend Of Ned Ludd at Liverpool Everyman
Image credit: Marc Brenner

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