Theatre Archive Project

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? http://sounds.bl.uk Page 1 of 18 Theatre Archive Project 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.

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