Same rules, different personnel

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Jack Shepherd talks to Carole Woddis about the writing of Holding Fire!

Where did the idea for the play come from?

The first play I wrote that was performed was called In Lambeth, about William Blake and Tom Paine. It was basically a dialectic about revolution, with one character arguing that you have to have revolution, the other arguing that it’s not worth the blood that it spills. A classic contradiction. Then about five years ago, I wrote a companion piece about Milton and Cromwell which was about what happens after a revolution. After this I began to feel that what I really needed to write was a third play which would show violent social change happening on an epic scale, destroying the lives of ordinary people – so you would end up with something like a triptych, two intimate plays either side of a big sprawling narrative.

But since that English Revolution in the 17th century, there hasn’t been a successful revolution in Britain. The writer Trevor Griffiths suggested I look at the Chartist movement, a revolution which very nearly happened. I did and got very intrigued by it. So when Dominic Dromgoole asked if I would like to write a really big play for the Globe, I knew straightaway that it would be this one because it was already in my mind.

Did it prove easy to write once you’d done the research?

The hardest thing was the structure. I eventually realised that to tell the story and engage the audience’s imagination, I was going to have to write the kind of story popular in the street ballads of the time. What I dreamt up was the story of a young girl from the London slums, who after a terrible crime committed in the household where she works, throws in her lot with the Chartist movement. This would be the spine of the play with the political narrative winding around it and the two threads coming together so that, by the end, both stories would be told at once.

Are the characters and their dialogue real or imagined?

The characters on the historical side of the narrative are real but the language re-invented. The people in the romantic ballad, the Harrington family and the terrible cook, Eli Morgan, are all made up. Eli came out of E. P. Thompson’s groundbreaking study, The Making of the English Working Class and the brilliant analysis of Methodism there that showed how it tried to justify appalling living conditions as a way of working off one’s sins before the Judgement Day. The people at the Birmingham Convention and at Newport are based on real people. D’Orsay was a real person, so too were Friedrich Engels and Zephaniah Williams.

The Chartists seem to represent the beginning of the move towards universal suffrage which perhaps only achieved its aim in 1969, when the voting age was brought down to 18. Was that your main aim, to show how we `won the vote’?
I think that’s secondary. What drives me, what fuels the play is a sense of outrage at the way working people were treated at the time and although there’s some history of things steadily getting a bit better, it wasn’t until 1945, with Attlee’s post-war Labour government, that things truly became better. It took an awful long time to get a National Health Service, to get a decent deal. People in the 1930s were still living in terrible squalor and coming as I do from an upper-working-class background – my father was a carpenter, my mother an infant school teacher – I identify with that very passionately.
Any society seems blind to the slavery, the suffering within itself. In the same way we’re now quite blind to immigrants doing all the dirty jobs we don’t want to do, usually for very little money. We’re just not aware of it.

In the same sense the early Victorian upper and middle classes, even when they could see people starving to death in the streets, the poverty didn’t impinge upon them. Most of them didn’t think to do anything about it. It’s that which fuelled me to write the play. It’s bitterly ironic to me, too, that the things for which the Chartists fought so hard are now hardly regarded by the people who benefit from them. I find Lovett’s speech at the very end about his fervent belief that education changes everything very touching. It’s cool now to reject education.

Can this play turn that around at all?

No, all you can ever do with a play is make people think about it. If you try and turn it into some kind of theatrical agitprop or politically motivated theatre you very quickly become propagandist, which is no good at all. Like Shaw, I believe you have to give your adversaries the best lines.

Were there any particular problems about trying to present a Victorian play within the Globe’s ambience?

The problem with the Globe for a director is that whatever he or she does it’s always going to look like a Palladian facade, garishly painted. The transformation can only happen in the imagination of the audience through the sounds that the band make and through the suggestions made in the text. It’s the only way that the stage transforms. Though the scenes at the Conventions, the pubs in London, the stately home in the north of England, do fit surprisingly well. Basically, the Globe stage doesn’t really like intimacy. It’s a public theatre. It likes energy, extrovert acting, broad strokes from the writer and having directed two plays in the auditorium and performed in the 1998 production of The Merchant of Venice, it struck me that if I can make each scene an event, I’m half way there.

In the early days at the Globe, audiences would often try and heckle. They’d heard that this used to happen in Shakespeare’s time and so in a the spirit of the last night of the Proms, they’d shout things at the actors. This tendency (middle class people ‘behaving rather badly’) has been steadily dying out. In Holding fire!, however, the audience are often addressed as though they were playing a part in the drama. For example in the scene on Kersal Moor, the people standing in the yard will be harangued as though they are oppressed textile workers. When they listen to the Convention they will become the delegates listening to the debate that’s going on. And so on. How they choose to respond to this remains to be seen.

There’s a lot of action in the play and your script calls for things like carriages and heavy guns. Doesn’t that present immense technical problems for the cast and director?

In actual fact, there aren’t many props brought on – a bed, some pub furniture – and there are all sorts of ways of suggesting a carriage without actually having one. But given the scale of the production, the number of parts, the amount of doubling involved, does present a technical challenge.

The effort required to mount an epic play is like breathing life into a dinosaur. It’s very hard getting it to its feet. But when it’s upright finally, it can be a thing of wonder.

In what other ways do you think the Chartists are relevant to us now?

It’s easy to see the Chartists now as heroes, but at the time they were upsetting the applecart; they were troublemakers. They had to be silenced, got rid of, for the good of the economy more than anything else, and the preservation of the status quo.

We do still have an establishment but it’s not dominated by the aristocracy any more. It’s dominated by people with vested interests in capitalism. The personnel changes, but the rules are the same. And just at the point when people start to think we’ve got rid of the class system, it erupts again in some other form. Class is something we don’t seem able to get rid of; it just shifts into something else.

What I discovered recently was that Disraeli, as a Tory, passionately believed that the lot of the working people in the country must be addressed. Things, he said, must be improved. However, he felt it was not the business of the working classes to do anything about it. Rather, it was up to the enlightened elite to reach down and help them into a better way of life. When the Liberal prime minister Lord John Russell tried to get what was eventually to become the Second Reform Act passed in the 1860s and failed, it was Disraeli who took it up as a principled Tory, delivering a degree of reform to the people in a very paternalistic way.

This play only deals with the first surge of Chartism up until 1839, It got going again in the 1840s but nothing directly happened in terms of having their terms met. But by the early 1870s nearly all the things they worked for had been put in place. It wasn’t until later that Members of Parliament were paid for their services, and the only Chartist demand never to have been realised is the idea of annual parliaments. It’s never been considered feasible.

Carole Woddis is a freelance theatre journalist and reviewer.

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