Following this debate on the Guardian theatre blog, a Brazilian journalist wrote to me asking some questions about Oh Well Never Mind Bye. I thought I’d post my responses here as they might be of interest!
Dear Lucas,
Thank you for your email. If it’s OK with you, I’d like to take your questions one at a time:
In the creative process, which came first: the urge to reflect on the current state of the British press or the desire to talk about the killing of Jean Charles?
Upstart’s creative process began very much by wanting to talk about the killing of Jean Charles. We ran a week-long workshop at the Oval House Theatre in London in February 2006, trying to explore ways in which we could dramatise both what happened to Jean Charles, and what happened in the aftermath of the shooting. At this time, the information available to the public was very fragmentary – the Independent Police Complaints Commission reports had not been released, and of course the inquest was years away from even starting. So we began by staging some of the many, conflicting and virtually all inaccurate eyewitness reports to the shooting: describing the events from different people’s points of view. We also presented a chronology of the events of the morning of the 22nd July as they were understood at the time, and a short improvised scene about the difficulties of accurately reporting what people actually saw. We presented about twelve or thirteen minutes of material to an audience that included Jean Charles’ cousins Patricia and Alex, as well as at least one police officer. After the performance we held a post-performance discussion that went on for an hour and 45 minutes – so we knew that this was a subject that people wanted to talk about, and to see theatre about.
As we continued the workshops, and at the same time more of the truth became known, all of us, especially playwright Steven Lally, became more and more interested in the way the British media had covered the story. The police’s official line, apparently supported by eyewitness reports, had been widely reported; the subsequent revelations that these reports were inaccurate had not received the same level of coverage. Many of our friends and colleagues still seemed to think that Jean Charles had jumped across the barrier, or that he’d run from the police. This is entirely due to the way in which the story was reported – and this led Steven to write Oh Well Never Mind Bye, a play which takes the killing of Jean Charles as its starting point but which also goes on to explore the way in which the British media operates when reporting on controversial stories.
What kind of research did the company perform to create “Oh Well…”? And what about the interviews: how many were conducted? With whom?
As well as reading as much of the coverage of the shooting as we could in the initial project and beyond, we read as much official documentation as we could find relating to the case – the two reports from the Independent Police Complaints Commission, documents from the Association of Chief Police Officers relating to the policy on dealing with suicide terrorism, and of course the transcripts from the inquest, which we attended on a number of occasions. A book called Flat Earth News, by British journalist Nick Davies, was also very important in researching the way the media operates. We interviewed a number of people connected with the de Menezes case – including the women who maintain the shrine to Jean Charles’ memory outside Stockwell station; members of the Justice for Jean campaign; Jean’s cousins; and former senior police officers. Steven also spoke to a large number of journalists about the conditions under which they work, which of course was hugely important in writing Oh Well Never Mind Bye.
Why, as the company began to develop the project, theatres and producers weren’t particularly interested in it? How did they respond to Upstart’s proposition? As ms. Stott from “The Guardian” suggests, is the Jean Charles episode one that generates interest exclusively (or at least predominantly) in left-leaning artists?
I think the first two questions are really for the theatres, rather than for us! As to Sally Stott’s point, I don’t think that all the artists involved in the three plays would describe themselves as “left-leaning” – although my own politics are left-of-centre. Personally, I think that theatre should be a place where we look the world in the eye – where we try and understand what’s happening around us. In order to achieve that we have to be honest – the first responsibility of the artist in society is to tell the truth – and I’m not sure that’s possible if you’re coming from a single, prejudged political perspective. Steven’s play is based on meticulous research, and some of the highest compliments paid to it were from working journalists, who described watching the play as being eerily like being back at work. What we tried to do in Oh Well Never Mind Bye was reflect as truthfully as possible the way we understand the modern British media to work; according to those journalists, a goal we achieved.
When you say in your comment on “The Guardian”‘s theatre blog that seeing a play about the wrongful shooting can help us all become a little more vigilant, one might read it as a statement of defense of a theatre fueled by activism. Is that an accurate reading? Aren’t theatre and activism a risky mix?
As I said above, I think theatres are places we go to better understand the world we live in. As we better understand the world, it’s only logical to think that we might try to change it for the better. If this is theatre fuelled by activism, I’m all for it. I think the mix of theatre and activism only becomes a risk when there is dishonesty – when theatre seeks to distort the truth in order to manipulate its audience towards activism. For myself, my own attitudes toward the media have been radicalised by working on Oh Well Never Mind Bye - the more we discovered, the more I came to feel there needs to be a change in how the media report the news. But crucially, this change in attitude came from learning about how things work during the creative process – the process didn’t begin with a need to change people’s minds, but from a need to understand.
I asked Michael Billington, theatre critic at “The Guardian”, about the plays. He said they share the same (and good, according to him) motive: “the collective guilt of liberal people who feel outraged at the panic, incompetence and subsequent cover-up by the Metropolitan police”. He goes on saying that “there is nothing self-indulgent about doing plays on this issue; it is a means of expressing widespread indignation”. To what extent was guilt a starting point for the “Oh Well…” creative team?
On the day Jean Charles was shot, Steven and I happened to be sharing a flat about two hundred metres from Stockwell tube station. We didn’t know Jean Charles, but he was a part of our community. As the truth about his death began to be revealed, we and our Upstart colleagues began to feel that his story need to be explored. How could two of our most important institutions – the police and the media – have failed, not only to protect him in the case of the police, but to tell the truth about what had happened? Were lies told, we wondered, or was it simply that people in both institutions believed the wrong information? I don’t think I ever felt guilty about Jean Charles’ death, but I know I felt indignation at being misled, however indeliberately. And the more we learnt, the more we felt that the truth needed to be told, and explored in a forum – the theatre – in which people could both watch and listen, and then afterwards both discuss and challenge what they’d seen.
I hope this helps you with your article. If you do have any more questions, please do let me know.
All best wishes,
Tom
