THEATRE ARCHIVE PROJECT http://sounds.bl.uk

Michele Ryan Interviewed by Katherine Irwin 9th November 2013

Michele Ryan Actress; agitprop; Michael Almaz; alternative theatre; Bradford Theatre; Bradford University; Bertolt Brecht; Howard Brenton; Brighton Combination; British Theatre companies; drama; David Edgar; Edinburgh Fringe Festival; feminism; General Will; Heads; humanism; Lynn Jones; Marxism; melodrama; middle classes; National Interest; Jeff Nuttall; Chris Parr; The People Show; Red Ladder Theatre; Rent; The Rupert Show; State of Emergency; The Welfare State; Wesley; Women’s Movement; working classes

[Track 1] KI: Okay, if you’d like to, state your name and place and date of birth

MR: My name is Michele Ryan, and I’m living in Cardiff at the moment and my date of birth is sixteen, eleven, 1949.

KI: And my name is Katherine Irwin, it is the ninth of November 2013 and we are at Michele’s house. Okay Michele, are there any particular memories from your childhood that have shaped you into the person you are today?

MR: Huh! I suppose being the eldest of five children has meant that I was the first one to go to university. I was obviously the eldest and a daughter so there were lots of different things about that. My Catholicism, I suppose at the time. I’m a humanist, but I was brought up a Catholic and I think that had quite an influence on me, along with going to a grammar school a Catholic grammar school for girls that was run by nuns so… [laughs] And what was interesting about that was that because it was run by nuns who are very academically interested, it meant that at school there wasn’t a differentiation between girls only do feminine things, and boys do sciences. It was basically you do whatever you’re good at, so, and I suppose the final thing is that during my childhood we went from being in fact quite poor, to my dad getting a better job and us slowly moving up from what I called almost a slum to a council house, to a semi-detached in a suburb in Cardiff. So through that experience I think, I would say that a lot of my orientation was to recognising what poverty and hardship can do to people.

KI: Okay. Did your schooling also lead you to be interested in the theatre?

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MR: Yes. I started - in fact I’ve got a photograph somewhere - I started in school. I wasn’t particularly extrovert, but somehow or another I started doing some plays in school, and then the English teacher really encouraged me, and she was the one that sort of said,why don’t you go on and do drama. But at the time, I was thinking no, no I’ve got to do something worthwhile, so I applied to Bradford University to do a degree in social work, but it’s one of those serendipitous moments where actually it probably was the best place to be for becoming involved in drama and theatre.

KI: Are you from a family of theatre goers or performersw?

MR: No. Not particularly. Well my mum liked the theatre, but no, there was nothing, nothing in the past to do that. So I don’t quite know what it would have been, other than it just so happened, that, you know, as a girls’ school you had to put on plays where you played male and female characters and so there was just, there was quite a lot of work put into drama at school so I got involved and then discovered, ooh, I really like this, and enjoyed doing it and my parents were very supportive, so, it just rolled from there.

KI: And you carried on with drama at university, you joined the Bradford University drama group didn’t you? What particularly drew you to that, was it just your previous experience in enjoying it at school or, was there anything about it that you thought, ooh?

MR: Well, I think because I’d chosen to go to university to do social work but had done an awful lot of drama at school and was really interested in English and loved spending time with my English teacher, when I got to Bradford I realised that I couldn’t do this social work degree for all kinds of reasons, partly political, social, partly the course itself. So I switched to sociology and English, and… there was a drama group and they appointed a fellow in drama, a man called Chris Parr, who had been working at the Brighton Combination which was a very independent alternative theatre company in Brighton, and so he came with quite a lot of connections and interest in doing lively new experimental drama. But also Albert Hunt was in Bradford, Jeff Nuttall was, The People Show. There was a lot of, there were just a lot of things happening in Bradford at the time, so it just seemed like an obvious thing to do, to get involved in the drama group and then, there were sort of two of us who seemed to play most of the female roles and woman called Lynn [ph] Jones and myself. And… so, we did three plays, for instance, written by Howard Brenton, one of which, Heads, he actually wrote for me and the other actors because the character, the female character is Welsh, in Heads. So he was just starting out. And then there was

http://sounds.bl.uk Page 2 of 18 Theatre Archive Project another writer called Michael Almaz and as it happened David Edgar was a journalist at the time on the Bradford Telegraph and he got involved - he was keen on writing drama - and so he got involved with us writing plays. So it just, it was serendipitous, it was landing in the right place at the right time. It was such a hive of creativity, Bradford, both in terms of the performance theatre, Situationists, alternative theatre, risqué theatre, all kinds of things were just going on, and quite a lot of it linked in with the kind of political culture of the time because Bradford University was right in the heart of Bradford, it wasn’t on a campus, it wasn’t, you know, remote, it was you literally walked out of the door and you were in the centre of Bradford, so there were lots of connections with the city as well and with the sort of different cultures, so inevitably it was going to be quite political.

[6:59] KI: Yes. Would you say theatre was your outlet for your political views when you first started with the Bradford University Drama group or would you say that progressed more when you went into, say, The People Show, The Welfare State?

MR: I would have said they were alongside each other, so after I suppose a year of being at the university I started at least becoming involved in the Women’s Movement and some of that was connected with International Socialists, IS, so that was a kind of, that was on that side, and then I was doing theatre as well. The political theatre really came towards the end of my third year and when we moved into General Will, so the politics was happening through IS- well I was on the fringes of IS, but through the Women’s Movement predominantly - and through various other things like the Claimants’ Union and working with black and Asian workers as well. And there was obviously, as I said, a sort of political culture, because it had only been a university for a few years, before that it had been a college of advanced technology, so it was kind of very earthy, it was, it was just rooted more in the city at the time.

KI: All this time spent on theatre ,it obviously affected your studies. Would you change any of that or were you happy with your transferral as well to English?

MR: Yes, yes, because there was some very good lecturers in both sociology and literature at the time and quite a lot around Marxist interpretations of literature as well. So it was a very unusual course in that sense as well, although at that time that was happening everywhere [laughs] up to a certain point, you know, because it was the time of sit-ins, occupations, a student revolution – 1968, that’s was the

http://sounds.bl.uk Page 3 of 18 Theatre Archive Project year I went. So obviously the political awareness in nearly every university was quite sharp at the time. So I don’t think, I don’t think that… did it… go back to that last question again and I’ll rethink.

KI: Do you want to go back to another question?

MR: What was that last one you just said then?

KI: I just said - sorry, I’ve been listening to you so intently… [laughs] I just asked you whether English was the right choice for you.

MR: Right, yes. Yes, so English and sociology was the right choice. What you asked me was whether the amount of drama had an impact on my degree, and it did, but at the time… one of my sociology- well the head of sociology- would call me in and said, ‘Come on Michele, you know, you’re not putting the work in’. Because of course I was in plays nearly all the time, so everybody could see that I was doing performances of all kinds, some more controversial than others [laughs], and so obviously I wasn’t spending an awful lot of time studying. Although when I look back, nearly all the literature that I loved, I read at that time, so even though I was doing a lot of theatre, there still seemed to be a lot of time to read because - and I read a lot, you know, kind of Russian, European, British literature and of course sociology, Marxism, you know, politics. So even though I didn’t actually do much in terms of my course, I did scrape through with a 2:2 so I must have done something. But on the whole, my commitment was to the drama, and at the time you just knew you would get work of some kind. So at the time I wasn’t sure whether I would then go on to drama college and carry on doing a drama training, or whether I would do something different and, as I said there were two parallel lines going on, so I was politically involved with the women’s movement and with IS at the time, because I’d become a member of IS and I was very involved in theatre and at the time I didn’t know what direction I was going to take, but both seemed to be more significant than getting a good degree.

[11:43] KI: Well that’s fair. I’d say English and theatre are very linked together as well, I think that’s why, as you say, in terms of political stances and that sort of thing I think, it helped. How much creative input would you say you had on the society, I mean you said yourself that you played mostly the female roles, would you say also you were a practitioner, or just a performer, or both?

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MR: I think we were all, we all worked quite collectively in lots of ways, sometimes I did some directing, we all collaborated on modifications on script because, you know, some things we’d have to improvise or we’d have to change because of different performance settings, venues. And I don’t, certainly I think because of feminism I certainly didn’t feel myself to be just the female appendage, you know, that would just - although some of the roles might have looked like that, at the same time I felt very much a central part of it all and initiated sometimes ideas for projects or, you know, would get involved in something. You know, working with - I did one performances, one set of performances for The Welfare State and one with The People Show, various other little bits and bats. It was like… I just felt quite a central part. There was one woman who was the sort of lighting, theatre technician and she, that was quite unusual, you know, and she was a really good lighting designer, and was very involved. So there was a way that possibly because it had been a college of advanced technology there was a bit more relaxation around women playing different roles and there wasn’t the same perception of just doing female parts as an addition to the men, that it felt much more integrated than that.

KI: I think your background, as you said, it came from playing female and male parts as well, do you think that helped influence the way you were when you got to Bradford and joined the drama group? Do you think that you’d always thought that you could play both parts?

MR: Yes, I certainly think that I could move from doing quite feminine to then singing songs doing a dance routine, as we did, because we did sort of melodrama around the Rent Housing Act and stuff. But training with another Ballet Rambert dancer, who gave me sort of basic skills [laughs] in performance, through to doing much more kind of male or macho or neutral, characters, you know, because some of the work we did we weren’t actually playing men and women, we might be playing debt collector, or landlord, you know, so we could move.

KI: Yes, so the characters weren’t always gendered?

MR: Yeah, yes that’s right.

[15:04] KI: Wonderful. Can you remember any specific techniques you looked at when you were devising or were there any theatre practitioners in particular that influenced your work?

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MR: Not particularly actually. I think, I think we saw ourselves as outside of the mainstream, as alternative or independent. Down the road in Leeds there was Red Ladder Theatre, so - there was 784 up north, and Pip Simmons, who was sort of… So there were all these different theatre companies, but everybody felt like - and it was Moving Being down in Cardiff - all doing quite different things. So some was more, definitely more experimental or situationist, and some was more towards, like Red Ladder and General Will, towards the political. So I don’t think… I don’t think that we…we looked to - because there wasn’t anyone – but things like, we might go to Artaud, for instance, The Theatre of the Absurd and definitely Brecht, so that would be one route that we’d been influenced by, is Brecht, Theatre of the Absurd, Ionesco, the kind of other voice, the other exploration, but at the same time we all felt like we were doing something - which I have to say, you know, if you thought of feminism and politics and drama, it was always new, you know, there hadn’t been a lived feminism for most of us before, there hadn’t been these kinds of drama experiences before, and so we were exploring new things. I mean certainly I think Howard Brenton’s plays were very different. We did something on Wesley because Wesley was very strong up in the north, and it was a play about Wesley but it was done in a Wesley chapel, you know. So it was taking theatre out of theatre and placing it in very different venues. Obviously in Edinburgh you’re always going to be in different venues, but wherever we performed - it might be in a pub, it might be on the street - there was… sometimes I’ll have… craft moment - Shirley Cameron and Roland Miller were doing performances along railway lines and somebody else was making black ice-cream, a Situationist kind of event, you know, to shock people into rethinking their relationship to their bodies or whatever, you know. So there was, there was just so much going on. We had, we did a big performance around complaining about will Harold Wilson be the Chancellor of the University and doing a mock degree ceremony and, so there was a lot of performance, there was a lot of seizing a moment, seizing an event, seizing a location and just doing something. So in that sense, yes, the references were much to Artaud. For us, working, Artaud and Brecht and then I think certainly David Edgar would certainly have seen himself as coming down the line from Brecht. But then others might have gone more into Artaud or the Italian drama or… So there… But I wouldn’t have said that I referenced a particular approach, because with, for instance, the thing I did with the People Show it was put a school uniform on and crawl along the floor with a cage with a mouse in it, or rat in it, I can’t remember. So like, where we are going to - you know, that was, that was the script [laughs] - so where are you going to reference that? It’s of itself.

[20:30] KI: What was the strangest place you performed at? You said you performed - and the strangest audience as well, because obviously you must have had all sorts of audiences that perhaps did or didn’t

http://sounds.bl.uk Page 6 of 18 Theatre Archive Project agree with your political stances which you were demonstrating as well - did you ever come across any particular backlash?

MR: Not particularly, I mean when we, in 1971 we were in Edinburgh doing some David Edgar plays and decided to form General Will. And General Will was going to be like an agitprop political theatre. I think we preferred the term political theatre more than agitprop, because agitprop sounded a bit more instructional and we didn’t feel we were being instructional, we always felt that it was performance, entertainment and politics. So with Rent, for instance, our philosophy was, perform in theatres and conventional venues in order to get enough money to perform in alternative venues. So then we might, for instance, perform in miners’ institutes, or tenants’ associations, or pubs, or working men’s clubs around the issues, so, like National Interest or something. Then obviously if you’re performing at trade union clubs or something they’re going to be completely with you and often, you know, they would be moved to tears because their story was put on stage. Where we performed in theatres we were part of that movement of sort of alternative and political theatre that was being booked and so we hardly ever got, you know, a huge resistance. There was always some people who would come up and complain about either the sex or the politics or whatever, but generally it was, it was received. I think probably the most negative comments we have - and I’ve still got the cuttings - we did a show called The Rupert Show, which was – and you won’t remember this [laughs], but anyway - The Rupert Show, at the time there was an alternative underground type magazine called Oz and it had taken the Rupert story and made it semi-pornographic. And so there was a trial where the owner/publishers were brought to court and, you know, tried for obscenity and putting down their idea of Rupert, nice Rupert Bear and , you know, horror, horror, Mary Whitehouse horror. So we did a play called The Rupert Show, which was about censorship, about what is the fuss about it, you know, freedom of speech, etcetera. And one of the sequences in it was because of the whole outrage around nudity on the stage as well, we had a sequence where we would stand - having said something about nudity - and ask the audience, ‘Did they want to see us naked?’ So me and the other actor, Alan Hulse, would stand there and say, ‘So do you want to see us naked?’ And everywhere we went, nobody ever wanted to. [laughs] So we’d never really - not that you can probably rehearse it - but the idea was we would literally just take our clothes off, stand for about twenty seconds, not doing anything, you know, so here’s a body, what’s the problem?, kind of thing. And then we performed in Cardinal Newman College, which was a Catholic training college, teachers’ training college, and it was full of people training to teach in Catholic schools and colleges [door bells rings] and priests. I’ll come back to it.

KI: I’ll just pause that for a second, pausing.

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[pause in recording]

[23:42] KI: Continuing.

MR: Yeah, so we, at this at Cardinal Newman College, there were priests, there were people who were training to be teachers to work in Catholic schools, etcetera, and we did our stock questions, ‘Does anybody want to see us naked?’, and nearly every hand shot up, which completely surprised us. [laughs] Afterwards we thought, probably it shouldn’t have surprised us, but it did. And so I took my clothes off and Alan didn’t. So he stood there, sort of frozen [laughs], and I took my clothes off, and stood there naked, of course, you know, and put them back on again. So that was a kind of very strange response and we got a lot of negative feedback about the play because, you know, it was saying what’s wrong with nudity and why censor people, etcetera, etcetera. That was probably the thing that we received the most newspaper cuttings about anyway.

KI: You said with that, with audience interaction - how much would you say you interacted with the audience within the sort of performances you did? Did you ask the audience questions quite a lot or were you…?

MR: Sometimes. Sometimes they would join in the songs, sometimes we would ask them to do something, like in The Rupert Show. So there was a level of audience interaction, but not the level that you would have expected, say, from The People Show or Welfare State, where there was definitely an attempt to get right into the audience, there was a lot of ideas around, shocking, provoking responses, challenging people’s preconceptions, that kind of thing. We didn’t do as much of that.

KI: Okay, The People Show was considered the first experimental theatre group in Britain, you know, you said there was other groups around at the time, would you agree with that title then?

MR: It depends who gave it that title. Did The People Show give it that title? Certainly I imagine that they would.

KI: [laughs] Yes.

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MR: Because Welfare State was going, and that was quite - and Pip Simmons, you know - so there were, quite… radical alternative theatre. The People Show was probably one of the best known and certainly provocative, radical, you know, Jeff Nuttall was in Bradford, he wrote quite a few things he was outrageous. At the time he was very provocative and there was that probably all the things that I did Jeff Nuttall was the person that probably I felt most used by, because his attitude to women wasn’t particularly great and he did just, you know, I just wanted to work with an experimental theatre company so I was dead pleased to be able to be involved, but my role was very conventionally, you know, the classic female; school girl uniform, you know, semi-naked, crawling along the floor. Not exactly my most assertive role. And Jeff, Jeff used to hold court in the pub, literally across the road from where our course and our students’ union was and, you know, he could be very provocative and quite sexist. So probably of everything I did that was the one that I thought… you know, there was always a reason for stripping, which was because of this thing of ‘it’s just a body’, you know. And in a way it would be great if more of that was being done now, that nudity, naked bodies, are not in themselves anything but what they are, but it’s the way of trying to pawn a body, you know, trying to represent it as ‘just’ a sex object as opposed to something more complex and interesting and challenging than that. So… And Jeff, certainly I can remember one time – I’m sure if he was still here he would deny it – but, you know, making the point that acid should be – LSD - should be dropped into people’s drinks just so that they gained the experience without knowing [laughs] that it was happening to them, and a big row ensuing about that. But that was the sort of man Jeff was really.

KI: Okay.

MR: As well as being very talented and very interesting, you know, but I think he, I think there were sort of issues around women that would probably have been difficult to fathom.

KI: Would you say that Jeff was then, he showed his unconventional ideas on men then, but still kept women in the same place, then?

MR: Yeah. Well he just was un-reconstructed. And the Women’s Movement had only arrived in Britain in 1969 so we’re talking, you know, this is all at the time, so he was carrying the male conventional view, that women are there for their pleasure, or women are there as an object of their desire or women are there to turn them on, or whatever, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t, you know, he was not influenced by feminism at all. He probably got to be more later on, but at the time.

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KI: Would you say as a feminist then that sort of, did you ever have disagreements or did you always just go along with him and what he felt like doing at the time, but sort sure of weren’t sure whether you were sure?

MR: Well, with The People Show it was very much like they were The People Show. So they were doing a performance in Bradford, they wanted a woman to be part of the show, they asked me and I thought, great, be really interesting to work with The People Show, and see how they work. I liked some of their ideas, and I liked them. Not so much Jeff [laughs] but I liked the others. So it was a real opportunity and I was looking at every single - because there were so many different ones - I was looking at every single opportunity to do all kinds of theatrical events and be involved. So whether it was the drama group, General Will, The People Show, Welfare State, odd little tiny events with other performers, I would go for it.

[31:06] KI: Can you say something about the 1970 Miss World demonstrations and Situationism?

MR: [laughs] [pause] Well, that was a really good opportunity for the kind of theatre, the kind of explosive spectacle; let’s do it, let’s create something mad. So - I mean I wasn’t involved in it - but certainly it was part of that aura. At the time it was sort of in the ether, a lot of performance, a lot of just grabbing the moment, creating the spectacle and making the people who were taking it all-so- seriously look ridiculous. Which they did.

KI: Okay, General Will when it started out has been described as specialising in ‘crude and cartoonish style of political commentary presented with generous dollops of music hall and burlesque for comedic effect’ - would you agree or would you like to expand on that?

MR: Where did you get that from? [laughs]

KI: [laughs] It’s now on Wikipedia, that’s what they say about General Will.

MR: Oh right, that’s one I hadn’t…

KI: It’s under David Edgar as they speak about General Will, obviously, in conjunction with him. [laughs]

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MR: So certainly it was - let’s have a look at it – it was certainly… Well, it goes back to what I said, that we saw ourselves as more political entertainment theatre rather than didactic, crude agitprop, but there was a crudeness about it, which was that we would change it all the time. We weren’t trying to polish it into some kind of theatrical performance but, if the crude came out, because I’m not quite sure, you know, if I was going to deconstruct the word crude, it kind of implies that there wasn’t a level of rehearsal and there wasn’t a level of technique, there wasn’t a level of performance, and there was. So on that level I would say it’s not crude. It certainly had dollops of music hall and burlesque, we definitely used those, and enjoyed doing that because it was a way of getting across ideas without it seeming didactic and overly agitprop. So in that sense, there always was an attempt for it to have a comedic effect. So the cartoonish element is probably true. I would dispute the sort of crude, but then, people have different meanings of crude. So I would say that’s a slightly crude [laughs] description. But certainly those elements were very much part of General Will. The idea was we weren’t going to be a worthy theatre company, we were going to use humour, we really liked the idea of music hall, burlesque, fun, song - songs that people could remember and sing in the show - but with an edge to it and with a political sharpness and awareness that was… quite interesting. And we were never short of bookings [laughs] as a theatre company. I mean obviously after a while it turned into something else, but for the first three years, two, three years of us being General Will, then that was the basic idea, yes. And it was certainly not about - where we thought we were being political was that established theatre was very middle class and did not make itself available to ordinary people, working people, did not speak to working people’s lives, and that therefore that’s what we wanted to work against, was to be in - which is quite Brechtian again isn’t it – is not to be in the Proscenium arch, not to be performing to middle class audiences, who would either feel uncomfortable or reinforced their own prejudices, but actually to engage with the people whose plays we were performing.

[35:55] KI: Would you say then, in a sort of way, that you guys were a voice for the working class? Because you obviously, you entertained them, would you say you were there more for entertainment or more for political value?

MR: Both. You know, because say there was a strike or a dispute or whatever, we could go and perform and put across those ideas that people, you know, so instead of it just being say, a trade union - and don’t forget that in the seventies there was certainly very little attempt to represent the voice of working people, you know, it was very much the voice of the professionals or the middle classes, there wasn’t much space at all, for working people to be represented. So our projects, our plays, our

http://sounds.bl.uk Page 11 of 18 Theatre Archive Project productions, would be speaking about what was happening on the ground and then going somewhere else and showing what was happening on the ground to other people who were also interested in it. And we would introduce new elements, if we’d come across someone who said well this is what’s happening here, or this is what’s happening there, you know, or these tenants have been evicted because, you know, that kind of thing. So I think for us it was about, it was both representing voice of people who were marginalised or not given a voice, sharing that voice with others who were interested or involved, enabling those who were politically motivated or involved in some kind of action or resistance to have performances that entertained people but also put across a message, you know. A bit in a way - and that’s where the agitprop comes from - a bit from the agitprop train say of the Bolshevik Revolution, where again, in order to communicate what was happening in Moscow or St Petersburg, people who lived in remote areas - they didn’t have TV or radio or anything like that - so they would send the train out and show films and posters and performances and go where the people were and give them information, entertainment, knowledge that they didn’t have access to. And I suppose - and that was happening very much in South America in terms of film, that they were making films out, they were taking films to remote communities and showing them. And in fact that’s why I got involved with, when I went, started making films. The same idea that you take, you take culture, you take ideas, you take fun, you take entertainment to people where they are, because they don’t have access to it any other way.

KI: Would you say then that your audience was mainly working class rather than the middle classes, or would you say that you appealed to all? Because obviously the venues you worked in were quite often working class venues when you were travelling around, so…

MR: Yes. But we also did some theatres and, for instance, somebody I spoke to recently still remembers Rent, which was our melodrama about the housing act, when she saw it at The Oval in London, you know. So obviously the people who came to something like that were either involved with tenants’ campaigns, or really annoyed or angry about what was happening to people, so they would come to the theatre to see it. And also we performed at universities, so obviously there’s a wide range of students there. But I think predominantly the idea was that we were taking theatre, we were taking art, we were taking – I mean however crude it might have been - to places where people were.

[40:08] KI: David Edgar is considered one of the most important British post-war playwrights, would you agree? Obviously you’ve worked with him and you’ve seen his works, what would you say?

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MR: Yes, I agree. [laughs] You know, it’s interesting seeing somebody who absolutely started out, so he was still a journalist when he started working with the theatre group in Bradford and then General Will and then obviously moved on very quickly then. And some of his writing is epic, and it is informed by a political awareness, a political sensitivity, still, and he can embrace quite big complex issues as well as doing Shakespeare… Dickens. So he definitely was a man who was going to grasp every opportunity and work it and hone his skills and realise his talent, really, and it was impressive. And he stands in that space probably more than Howard Brenton – or Howard Brenton’s been involved in, you know, in a looser but sort of politically aware - but they came out of that time when theatre was very conventional. And not just Brian Rix farce, if you like, but it didn’t have that sense of experimenting or challenging or working to the edges of anything. And so there were lots of different initiatives, if you look, you know, if you looked at Edinburgh during those years, there were a lot of influences coming from Europe as well as in Britain that were attempting to produce theatre in different venues, with different voices, with a completely different kind of energy and wanting to experiment, and not accept the conventions as kind of dry and fusty. So, you know, you could see it as going from some experimental work which was just purely around performance or the body or movement – a bit like Moving Being was in Cardiff for a while - and then went on to produce more and more glorious spectacles, through to hard edge political theatre that might be you know Red Ladder, General Will to a certain degree, and then out of that things like The Gay Sweatshop and… So there were a lot of voices clamouring to be expressed, shared, communicated, realised.

KI: Say, today, now coming from that sort of experimental era there is a lot of experimental theatre - would you say that it’s lost its touch or is it still as important now as it ever has been, even when it was up and rising, there was perhaps more to shout about?

MR: I think there’s just as much to shout about, in fact possibly more in some ways, but I think what’s happened is that the system, the kind of mainstream culture has made it more difficult. When we started out we could just grab a room in the back of a pub, or upstairs, or anywhere really, and do a performance. And so we had a transit van, we lived on virtually nothing, we just performed wherever we could, we were incredibly flexible. Now, if somebody wants to perform in a pub they have to have insurance, there’s health and safety, the regulations in the pub, all of which is designed to stop very many of these public spaces being used. Because I remember thinking why aren’t young drama graduates seizing the moment, the opportunity and putting on performances in pubs or bars or halls or anything? And it’s just not happening, and so there are issues around the way that the state has closed

http://sounds.bl.uk Page 13 of 18 Theatre Archive Project down a lot of possible spaces for expression. You know, there was a big tenants’ movement, you know, people were occupying empty buildings and so you put performances on in empty buildings, you know, and somebody attempted to do that with the police station round the corner here and straight away they got evicted, you know. The Occupy movement, whilst it exists, it’s very hard for them to be anywhere, whereas in the sixties and seventies we could take over loads of places and nobody seemed to be that bothered about where we did it. So I think that that kind of shut down of venues, or possible venues has closed off that idea. I think in the same way, you know, the fact that we were at college and we didn’t have to pay for anything and we got a grant, in a way we could afford to do stuff without very little money at all. Accommodation was really cheap, as long as you lived in a semi-slum [laughs] or whatever. So there were lots of areas, whereas a lot of student today, they’re going to have a huge debt by the time they’ve graduated, it’s not so easy to put on spontaneous improvised performances anywhere, the idea of, you know, racking up an audience, which we were just so familiar with, wherever we went we’d always have a pile of leaflet and we’d be distributing them, you know, so that we did everything really before the show and then after the show. And I’m not sure, well I’m not sure that a lot of drama students or students involved in theatre feel this is the time to speak or rage, or react and they’re concerned with careers and so there’s less opportunity to think, oh for a couple of years or three years we won’t do anything but hit the road and, you know, it’s perfectly possible, it used to happen in Bradford, people would just perform out the back of a van, do you know what I mean, or in the middle of the street. You just, there is a bit of street theatre, again, but even that’s quite regulated these days isn’t it? You know, you’ve got to supposedly get a licence and you’re only allowed at certain times, because of obstructing the highways or the pedestrian precincts. So you see much more of that in other parts of Europe where there’s less tightening of regulations, pity.

[47:32] KI: General Will, how democratic would you say the group was, and also you were travelling the country, how was it being - were you the only female in the group of General Will? How was it, travelling with a group of males in the back of a van? [laughs].

MR: Well it’s a transit van. There was Janet, who was an administrator, but she tended not to come with us very often so she would be back in Bradford taking phone calls, making bookings, that kind of thing. So it was usually just me. Well I knew everyone and we were mates much more than - I had had a relationship with one of the actors before, but we’d kind of arrived at a sort of - don’t know if it was fully mutual – but anyway we’d arrived at a decision that we were going to be professional about this and get on with the job in hand, which was to perform and we got on well with each other. I suppose…

http://sounds.bl.uk Page 14 of 18 Theatre Archive Project you know, I was politically quite aware, so I was politically aware, I was a feminist, so I was used to public speaking, because you had to [laughs], I was, I’d done lots of different kinds of performances so I felt quite confident. I mean I didn’t think, oh I’m a great actress or anything because it wasn’t really about that in that sense, but I certainly felt confident in what I was doing and, you know, in some ways probably felt a bit more, not in control, but involved in the running of General Will more than maybe one or two others. So we used to get on really well and we’d have a laugh and just put up with kind of, you know, sometimes we’d - I remember, I think it was in Aberystwyth Student Union [laughs] or something, we ended up all having to sleep in the kitchen, because there was nowhere else to sleep, you know, and you’d have a sleeping bag and stuff. And we just, on the whole we got on really well. There were times where we’d have disagreements but we seemed to manage to sort out the disagreements most of the time. I think where it started to split, and one lot stayed in Bradford and I moved and John moved, was around politics really, that I thought I wanted to get more involved, politically involved, and the others, at least two of them, were much more interested in doing the theatrical, you know, expanding the theatrical area. And I think I’d came to a point where I had to make a decision one way or the other. So… and John was doing the same, so there was, there was a way that we were going to split and then the agreement was that General Will would stay in Bradford, keep the name and carry on working with whoever was interested in working with General Will. So it became a broader base, a broader organisation and much more involved in the community, so probably more like community theatre rather than agitprop or political theatre.

KI: What was your favourite production with General Will?

MR: [Pause] I think Rent probably because it was so mad in a lot of ways. It was just, it was musical, it had, you know, it could do melodrama and everything because of nasty landlords and people trapped and not being able to escape and all that kind of thing. So in the sense that it blended old theatrical forms with political theatre, with songs, it was fun to do, so I suppose on that level I liked that. But they all had intriguing aspects to them so I’m not sure I would say there was one that was a major favourite, but certainly Rent stands out as being the most unusual.

KI: Okay. Was there any production that meant the most to you perhaps politically or for other reasons?

MR: Well The National Interest, you know, this is during the time when there were lots of different strikes: miners’ strikes, electricians - there was power cuts - there was a lot of stuff going on. And lots of

http://sounds.bl.uk Page 15 of 18 Theatre Archive Project sit-ins, shop stewards’ movement. So it all tied in with that. So in that sense it felt very- what’s the word? It was happening at the same time. So as all of this was happening, we were performing and altering and things were happening so quickly politically that you would have to change and adapt the show in order to keep up to date, you know, so it felt very current, very alive at the time. So probably in terms of drawing in on politics and people’s lives and working class resistance to oppression and exploitation and Heath, etcetera, it was probably the one that was most current.

[53:25] KI: What made you as a group in the first place decide to break off and create General Will?

MR: I think because we were doing National Interest which turned into State of Emergency, so that was all connected up with that. So David Edgar was, you know, very much writing for us. The stuff we were doing was getting a good response, we were having good reviews in Edinburgh, we were coming to the end of our degrees, we didn’t know what to do next. Politically it was all kicking off in the country [laughs] It just seemed like a good thing to do. We talked about it in Edinburgh, we though yeah, let’s go for it, let’s see what happens. We raised enough money, got a little bit of funding so we could get a van. And we had bookings, so the show, The National Interest and stuff that we’d been doing in Edinburgh had led to quite a few bookings that were going to happen after Edinburgh. So we either didn’t bother with them and just shut up shop or thought right yeah, let’s do these bookings, let’s follow through. So what we going to call ourselves, what we going to do, how we going to do it, and it all started that way.

KI: What was the Edinburgh Fringe Festival like as an experience as well, what was it like performing there?

MR: Great, because in those days there weren’t that many fringe. You know, it’s massive now, but at the time it just felt wonderful because we were in a place called - what’s it called? [looks at papers in front of herself] The Crown. [rustles paper] Right, well this would give you an example. [shows me Edinburgh Fringe Festival programme from the year she performed] This is the Fringe programme [rustling] - it’s going to make a lot of noise – but, you know, that’s it. Whereas it would be massive now, you’d have a book. And we had , what had been a little pub. So, did The Crown, which was a small pub in Edinburgh, and it one was of the sort of hubs. So, like Pip Simmons was on and we all hung out in the same flat and loads of other theatre groups were there and we all sort of knew each other, so you’d be going to see each other’s shows and performances and just casually hanging out. And it was just so alive, you hardly slept, you know, you would be picking up someone in Edinburgh, they would be making

http://sounds.bl.uk Page 16 of 18 Theatre Archive Project bread, buns, sort of at three o’ clock, four o’ clock in the morning, so you’d be picking those up because you’d been up all night talking and following through with other theatre companies. So it was just so alive. And good audiences as well, so it wasn’t like - you got good at marketing your show, so you’d either be in costume or you’d rope in people so that you would hand out your leaflets to advertise your shows, and stuff like that. But that was, it was an amazing time and you connected up with lots of very different people, you know, many of whom are now big names in the theatre world or film world. But at the time everyone was starting out, including people like - what’s his name? The comedian, singer? Married to Pamela Stephenson? [Billy Connolly]

KI: Can’t think. [laughs]

MR: No. [laughs] Lindsay Kemp, I worked at bit with Lindsay Kemp at Edinburgh, and then that followed, that led to some other adventure with him later on. So things got picked up in Edinburgh that fed into various things that you did later, or connections that would get you bookings because other people had seen you at Edinburgh and wanted you to come and do different shows. And the year before, or was it the same year? Myself and Lynn [ph] Jones had done a play, written by David Edgar, about two women sharing a flat, one of whom thinks she’s Rosa Luxemburg- a German revolutionary - and one who thinks she’s Marilyn Monroe. So I played Marilyn Monroe and Lynn [ph] played Rosa Luxemburg- two kinds of Rosa. And there were lots of kind of favourable reviews and interest in Dave Edgar as a writer, you know, which led to other possibilities. So Edinburgh was a hub, obviously, that produced a lot of interest and a lot of opportunities to connect up with other alternative and experimental and political theatre companies and to network and to find other opportunities as a result.

KI: You had a successful span in the theatre then, why did you decide to leave the theatre in the end?

MR: Well, around about the time when I was deciding, as I said, towards the end of my degree I was thinking should I apply to drama college, and then at the same time…

[59:25] [Technical difficulties, SD Card fault, interview is cut short. After several attempts to get the equipment working again we decided we shall briefly try to summarise some final points and conclude the interview. The recording kept cutting short]

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[Track 2] KI: Okay Michele, is there anything you’d like to add, like overall how would you characterise your involvement in British theatre, or how would you summarise the changes and continuities in your profession throughout your working life so far?

MR: Well, I think for me General Will was the first time that actually brought together both my interest in drama and theatre, my desire to do something creative with my political interests, and my kind of commitment to enabling people to find their own voice and then have that voice heard and shared by others and expressed in a creative way. So that was the first time it all came together, it came together in a collaborative way in the company in that we all worked together and had very similar ideas - I mean different, but similar. It worked in terms of historically the moment when this was all happening, because so much was the first time that anything had happened, first time we wore miniskirts, first time there was contraception, first time that there was music that spoke to us in a different way. It was like a whole culture post-war, post my parents’ generation, emerged and all kinds of ways of looking at the world, making sense of the world, creatively expressing it, started to happen for the first time, that’s what most of us felt like. So it was a kind of un… it was stepping into the unknown in a kind of pioneering way. So even though General Will I don’t think was a, you know, a significant big slice of theatre history or whatever, it was certainly one of the contributors to looking at theatre in a different way, to looking at different venues, different voices, different ways of speaking to the world. It was also the time when cinema was beginning to bring working class people’s voices on to the screen. You know, so there was a change in the whole ethos and culture that actually…

[2:15] [Interview cut short because of technical difficulties]

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