Happy Birthday to the Liverpool Playhouse

      
                           Liverpool Playhouse

As we celebrate the centenary of the Liverpool Repertory Company, the theatre is under severe financial pressure. When my play Self Catering (A Short History of the World) premiered at the Liverpool Playhouse studio in the 1990s, concern about funding was also a critical issue. It's a reminder that the campaign to protect the arts isn't a passing inconvenience; it's a permanent battle for anyone who understands that the wealth of a nation can't just be measured in pounds and pence.

I became a playwright because it rained in Liverpool on a particular Wednesday in 1989. I went to shelter in the Open Eye photography gallery and found a leaflet advertising the Liverpool Playhouse Young Writers Award. I was already a published writer - I had a letter in SHOOT! magazine when I was eleven - but I hadn't written for the stage. North won a £1,000 cheque and was performed in the Studio Theatre. It wasn't badly received except by a friend's mother who resented the admission price of £3. She said "it was only worth £1.50".
            I was very pleased to come back to the Studio Theatre with Self Catering (A Short History Of The World)...and fortunate that there was a Studio Theatre to come back to. There has been a permanent theatre on this site since 1866; it would have been an indictment of today’s Britain if we allowed a 125-year-old theatre to die. Salman Rushdie has spoken about the importance of allowing writers to have access to “the arena of discourse”. That access is being threatened by economic, as well as religious, fundamentalism.
            Theatre, unlike cinema or sport, has so far escaped the most conspicuous interventions of commercial sponsors. I hope we’ll never get to the stage where Macbeth is obliged to drink Heineken in the banquet scene and Hamlet has to wear Adidas training shoes and smoke Marlboro. The more insidious and sinister effect is that companies, sensitive about their public image, will neglect plays which, for reasons of style or substance, lack mass appeal. This is the sham and the shame of the free market approach to arts funding. Sponsorship can lead to censorship.
            Too many theatres are producing bland musicals or stage versions of television programmes. George Bernard Shaw said that art is the food of the soul; Allo Allo is the fast food of the soul. Increasingly it’s left to studio and fringe theatres to provide a more varied menu.
            The people at the Liverpool Playhouse have helped me a lot while I’ve been trying to achieve my long-term ambition. To write a play worth more than £1.50.

I wrote those words nearly twenty years ago. They were printed next to the cast list for the premiere of my first full-length play, a comedy called Self Catering (A Short History of the World). It was put on stage by Kate Rowland, Artistic Director of the Liverpool Playhouse, who had a bold and brave policy of commissioning young unknown writers. After a successful run in the Playhouse Studio and a tour of England’s eclectic theatrical venues, including Runcorn Library, Self Catering was filmed by Channel 4 and published by Warner Chappell. Thanks to the Playhouse, I had a lucky start.
            One of the oddities about taking Self Catering on tour was learning that you can’t watch the same play twice. Every night was different.  The scene that made people laugh in Brighton barely raised a titter in Tamworth. When the play appeared at the Liverpool Playhouse Studio, some nights it was ten minutes longer, simply because the audience was laughing so much. 
            I’m very fond of that Grade II listed building in Williamson Square, a distinctive synthesis of 1860s and 1960s architecture which is like seeing Brahms jamming with the Beatles, but when we celebrate the Liverpool Playhouse we’re really honouring all the amazing people who’ve contributed to its history. Not just the dedicated theatre workers, onstage and offstage, but also the open-minded and open-hearted audiences.
            For a hundred years, thousands of shows attended by millions of people have created a legacy of a trillion personal memories. Here are a few of mine.
            When we were rehearsing North in Matthew Street, I attended a planning meeting and listened to a debate about whether we could afford to buy a loaf to rehearse the sandwich scene. Even in those days there was never enough bread to go around. The opening night coincided with a heatwave. The audience provided air-conditioning by wafting the cast list vigorously while the poor actors on stage, who were supposed to be stranded on a train in a frosty forest, were sweating desperately inside woolly jumpers and thick coats.
            I saw the studio theatre transformed into a broken train, a wintry wood, a desert island, and for my third play there, Pig’s Ear, a suburban house. In the middle of a scene I saw an actor elbow another actor in the ribs even though this wasn’t in the script. It was a moment of improvisation inspired by a off-stage dispute between the two actors. On another night two actors slipped accidentally into dialogue from the last scene of the play. Unfortunately they were half an hour early. Their fellow actors began to giggle. I was sitting on the back row of the auditorium with the director, Ramin Gray. I considered ending the play there and then, but Ramin wisely decided to let things continue. The flummoxed actors got to the end of the final scene and then looked confused when the play carried on. Half an hour later they performed the final scene again, with exactly the same dialogue. Nobody in the audience seemed to find this odd, even the local critic. He wrote the best review I’ve ever had from the Liverpool Echo.
            I once saw the same critic fall asleep ten minutes after the start of a play. Luckily the play wasn’t one of mine. He woke up ten minutes from the end and wrote a cantankerous review. I still don’t know what he was reviewing. He must’ve had a bad dream. My time at the Playhouse taught me the degree of wisdom in Christopher Hampton’s observation that “asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs”.
            It’s thanks to the Playhouse that I’ve never had what my folks called “a proper job” and for that I am grateful, most of the time. As a full-time writer you don't have the benefit of sick pay, holiday pay, and, quite often, pay. I often see advertisements in newspapers with the headline 'Why Not Be A Writer?' Some days I can think of a dozen reasons.
             But somehow over the years I’ve written plays, films, short stories, non-fiction books for adults and picture books for children. Everything was made possible by the opportunity, the freedom and the confidence that I was given by the Liverpool Playhouse.
           The next generation of writers, directors and actors deserves the same opportunity.


                                                                                                               Andrew Cullen, 2011