As Hull Truck Theatre prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary with a hilarious and irreverent new comedy, 71 Coltman Street, writer Richard Bean and director Mark Babych discuss the theatre’s roots and capturing the spirit of the iconic venue.
How did the idea come about to create 71 Coltman Street for the theatre’s 50th Anniversary?
RB: Over the years I’ve been chatting with Alan Williams, the actor, and early pioneer of Hull Truck with Mike Bradwell. I worked with Alan at the Royal Court in a Hull play, Under the Whaleback, where he played one of the great iconic deckie heroes of Hessle Road, Dillinger. Alan was always chatting about Coltman Street and the early 70s in Hull. So when the 50 years came around it seemed logical to try and capture the madness of that time in a kind of Young Ones scenario.
MB: As a company we love to creatively respond to moments in time, and much like we did with James Graham’s The Culture in 2018, having a brilliant playwright capture a significant event in our history and translate this into a good night out in the theatre seemed a perfect way to celebrate how we began. It’s important that the origins of our company get told as a lot of the work that our pioneers, and indeed the people who originally supported the company in its early years like Alan Plater, can tend to be forgotten. I felt the spirit of what Mike was trying to achieve deserved to be shared to a wider audience.
Does it feel particularly special to be presenting this story to kick off the celebrations?
RB: It does, it feels for me like an origin story in the Marvel style. How it all started; the madness; the privations; the rat under the stairs; the buried dog in the yard with its legs still sticking up; the horse; the phone box outside etc
MB: Of course – looking back at where we came from and what drove the ideals of the early pioneers of the company has been really inspiring and of course gives us a great starting point from which to build the rest of the year’s programme. 71 Coltman Street is just the first in a suite of work that takes us on a journey from who we were in the beginning to who we are now. The programme continues to platform the creativity of local people, culminating in a great new comedy, Mumsy by Lydia Marchant, a vibrant young Hull writer who the company is proud to have commissioned and developed over several years.
How closely are the events and characters in the play based on real life people? How does this influence the writing and casting?
RB: I talked to quite a few of the early actors and also Mike himself. From that I tried to build something that looks right rather than is accurate. As the playwright I have a responsibility to make a play that works on the night, and that always has to take priority over making a documentary. But Mike started it in 71 Coltman Street, living with Rachel Bell with a phone box in the street, and that’s the foundation of everything.
MB: I’ve tried to capture the spirit and energy of those pioneering artists rather than look for exact likenesses in the casting. It’s important that the actors representing them understand what drove them and play that truthfully and honestly, so I was looking for people with a certain empathy for the ideals of the company as well as gathering a group of actors who could also sing and play several instruments.
The early Hull Truck work featured a great deal of music, and our production includes some great new songs by Richard Thomas, based the originals songs by the company. The play gives a fascinating insight into the creative processes by which actors researched their roles as well as develop and perform one of their cabarets.
During the research and planning for the play, did any new stories come to light?
RB: I knew a few of the stories, but there were endless little tidbits that came up. One actress lasted a day at Coltman Street, but having found a dead rat on the stairs she rang her dad who drove to Hull and took the poor girl home. I didn’t know about Genesis P Orridge and the COUM collective.
They would hang around Coltman Street trying to be weird. No-one had ever mentioned the horse and the intimate attention it received occasionally. But one thing about Truck, and this carried on to when John Godber was running the theatre, the actors always had mad stories of being on the road and sharing digs. It was such an improvising, roughing it scenario, and so different from today where actors get their per diems and digs allowances and Equity minimum. I’ve seen photos of Truck actors in digs four to a room and sleeping on the floor.
What role did Hull play as a city in the creation of a new theatre company?
RB: Mike always says that Hull was perfect for his plans because the actors could sign on and there was no chance of the Labour finding any of them a job. But there is also the very practical thing that, with property prices low, it is possible to live on a low income and still be creative in this city. At that time you could go to Joan’s shop and buy one egg, one fag, one spud. Hull was geared to survival.
MB: Aside from the practical realities that a city like Hull could afford a group of artists trying to make new work, artistically it was a great feeding ground for the creative imagination, enabling the actors to live and work together driven by a belief in the same thing, to create theatre that reflected the lives of ordinary people that was truthful and real.
The play gives us an insight into the rehearsal methods Mike used with the company to research and devise their shows. We see how this approach enabled the actors to respond to the city and its people and build stories based on their observations. It also gave us our name, a name that captures a certain determined independent energy and spirit that unapologetically lets you know where it’s from.
This is the first of five new plays within the 50th anniversary season. What are the opportunities and challenges to creating new work?
MB: It’s always exciting working on something new as it’s an opportunity to do something magic together that’s never been seen before. A lot of work goes into the process and the work is constantly evolving as you work through initial ideas to draft stages, rehearsal and then previews, where we road test what we have in front of an audience.
As you evolve and refine the production, you learn a lot of things along the way, some pleasant surprises, some not, things that don’t work as well as you’d hoped, so you have to remain open and flexible until the point where we let the story go and fly in front of you, our audience. With this amount of new work in the season it is of course challenging, but without these fresh perspectives on the world, I don’t believe it would be as creatively rich.
Mike Bradwell has been quoted as saying this piece captures ‘the spirit’ of Hull Truck Theatre – how would you capture this spirit in one or two sentences?
MB: Until the repeal of the theatre censorship laws in 1968, where since 1843 The Lord Chamberlain’s Office had almost complete control over the content of what could and could not be said in a play, theatre makers and playwrights were hampered and at risk of prosecution should they stray into territory that the authorities deemed unfit.
With its abolition writers, directors and producers could be free to express life as they saw it without the censor breathing down their necks, however there was still a vociferous band of people still opposed to this new freedom, objecting to language and challenging content. So, in this context, I see the spirit of early Truck was one of disruption, defiance, freedom but ultimately driven by the truth and a great deal of fun.
RB: Early Truck plays had an obsession which was to put the lives of young people on stage. The 70s was a strange time. The idealism of the 60s had dissipated and these post-hippies were all trying to find a way to survive without selling out. Mike would say the spirit was Chekhov and Bo Diddley, which translates as democratic truthful theatre, and rock and roll.
Richard, you grew up in Hull and around the time Hull Truck Theatre was formed – what impact would you say Hull Truck has had on your career and your approach to writing?
I didn’t see the Bradwell era of Truck as I was only fifteen in 1971 and wasn’t going to the theatre. I was around that scene though in the way that teenager who is too young to drink can be. I went to the gigs, and Brickhouse, and hung around the Arts Centre.
As far as influence on me goes, I’d like to think that I’ve always wanted to put ordinary people on stage, and in the way that Mike demands to be fascinated by the ordinary, then I’m fascinated by the ordinary.
Mark, the people of Hull and their stories have always been what makes Hull Truck Theatre so unique – how will this play a part in the rest of the anniversary programme?
From 71 Coltman Street, to Lydia Marchant’s new play Mumsy, the arc of the 50th Anniversary programme takes us from our origins to a glimpse of the future, ending with a bright talent from Hull writing about real people in the city in which she grew up. Along the way, we mark John Godber’s time here with a refreshed and revised version of Teechers that responds to the challenges now in our education system, influenced by the voices of teachers and young people in Hull.
Local people will take part in our community production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Amanda Whittington reflects on the influence the last two years has had on a group on Hull women in Ladies Unleashed – our Hull based A Christmas Carol reflects on a past, present and future and local writer Sam Caseley gives us a fresh new story for early years children and their families in Jack Mum and The Beanstalk. All in all, we’ve tried to give a snapshot of where we are as a company now and celebrate the breadth and depth of our creative work and ambitions and the audiences we serve.