Feature: Stellar performances

Published: 2 December, 2010
by JOSH SURTEES

The actors mingle with the audience in Shepperton Road, a new play based in an Islington pub 

AT about the same time that 16 million people sat down to watch EastEnders on Monday evening, a slightly smaller crowd – about 60 – squeezed into a north London pub to watch a far more enthralling soap opera unfold around them. 

Shepperton Road is a four-part drama taking place every Monday at the Rosemary Branch on the edge of De Beauvoir Town; and drama is certainly the right word for it. In 25-minute episodes the audience are treated to a taste of classic soap themes: adultery, jealousy, domestic violence, sibling rivalry, robbery, marital strife, attempted suicide and even a peanut-allergy attack. With the action taking place right in front of the bar, amongst the crowd, it’s a production that challenges the boundaries and definitions of theatre.

“We wanted to bring together two worlds: the regular drinkers in a pub and the world of theatre,” explains Rosa Connor who, along with Afsaneh Gray, wrote the play. “Often theatres can feel quite inaccessible and intimidating to people who weren’t brought up in that kind of middle class, theatre-going environment.” 

Part of Connor and Gray’s mission was to stage a production not just for other luvvies and the local Islington bohemian set, but for people who have lived in the area for years and visit the pub just for a pint.

No stranger to site-specific theatre, ISO productions and director Carissa Hope Lynch, have previously staged a play in an abandoned housing estate just weeks before it was demolished. The current production is a prelude to a larger heritage theatre project scheduled for summer 2011 focusing on the history and identity of the area – a kind of no man’s land between Hoxton, Shoreditch and Islington where the traditional industry-based buildings and communities along the Regent’s canal are slowly being replaced by shiny creative design agencies and young, upwardly mobile professionals. 

“We’re talking to as many local people as we can to be sure that everybody’s voices are heard. Rosa’s even doing shifts behind the bar!” says Gray laughing, “she’s our ‘plant’ on the inside. Interestingly, we’ve found that newcomers to the area can feel a sense of ownership of these places too.” 

Next summer’s project will feature an audio walk along the canal beginning at Angel or Haggerston converging on the pub where performances will take place.

Producer Keri Jenkins is currently fundraising for the project and hopes to receive financial backing from the Arts Council and the National Lottery fund. ISO productions will use the funds to work with local day centres, community theatres and youth projects to build a narrative of everyday people’s lives. 

As the “live soap opera” reaches its climax the pub crowd seems genuinely in awe of the actors. Matt, a regular, thinks the young cast are very daring. Actor Jane McMahon, who plays young mother Jade, tells me she prefers perform­ing amongst the crowd than on a stage. “It was much more intimate and real,” she adds. 

Later I talk to landlady Lucy Marshall who is in the middle of cooking delicious homemade sausage rolls for the punters. The restaurant is closed on Monday nights,” she says. “It’s normally the quietest night of the week; just a women’s hockey team that come in at nine o’clock. We normally close early.” 

Lucy explains how Cecilia Darker, ex-ballet dancer and owner of the Rosemary Branch, established the theatre upstairs and is hugely supportive of experimental projects. 

“Last month we had an opera taking place in the bar. I think it’s a brilliant concept and the regulars love it.”

Shepperton Road is a brave feat of theatre which all types of people can engage with – a vital quality in an often alienating performing arts landscape. In a public environment that must feel intimidating, the actors build the plot in a way that keeps you absorbed in the electrified atmosphere, even providing a marvellous all-singing, all-dancing commercial break skit halfway through. Best of all you can enjoy the drama whilst drinking a pint of ale in the surrounds of one of N1’s finest pubs.