Rewind to After Her Death: 1998

Buster died suddenly last week; we had him for 10yrs.  It was a huge shock, and hearts broken.  I’m back at work, he is no longer under the desk and I move forward, look at my list and start to write this blog. 

We are celebrating 25yrs of Open Clasp Changing the World, I’m asked to go back to the beginning – at the beginning I was grieving the loss of my mum, Edna.  I was 29 yrs. When she died, she was 60 (my age today).  After she died, I moved with my baby son to Newcastle to be with my new girlfriend (now my wife), to place my feet on the ground in Newcastle and toes in the North Sea, I needed to breathe out…it was 1993. After two years of working in a bar I went back to education after leaving school at 16 – A Drama Degree at Northumbria University.   I’d discovered drama/theatre for social change when I was on a Youth Opportunity Scheme in Liverpool.   I met left wing people and feminism, it was the year of the Falklands War and three of my four brothers where in there.  A juxtaposition of cultures and I moved with both.  I had already been political without knowing it.  At 17 I was kicked out and my clothes burnt. I moved in to a bedsit with my girlfriend and we got a cat.  We told no one, we didn’t know any lesbians and homophobia both internal and external sat on our stairs (we had the top bedsit). 

After a year on the scheme I was awarded a job in Salford to ‘teach’ other young people on a Youth Training Scheme, similar to Liverpool in its delivery, this time I was the ‘trainer’, I was 19 and in the Liverpool Echo.  Here I met lesbians and feminists, then Greenham Common Women came to town and I sat in gardens and listened. Inspired and impulsive I hitchhiked to Greenham, left my job and lived outside the law for a year, it was a moment in my life I will always treasure and feel blessed.  It was revolutionary, women surrounded the nuclear base, each camp named in colours, ours was Blue Gate, working class and diverse (and near the pub).  When I think back most of us where young, I was 20, the older women ahead of us must have only been 25 or 30.   More politics, I met and fell in love with a Derry woman, learnt about Ireland, another lens and view from my army family.  I met Native Americans living on an Uranium site and the miners wives sat with us at the fire, all connected in our need to fight injustice. 

After Greenham I moved back to Manchester and was part of community theatre, activism and politics, marches and protests (section 28) and I became a lesbian mum – it was 1991.  A year later my mum died, I moved to Newcastle and I went to university. 

The first year was about acting, the second facilitation and the third you could choose facilitation or acting or both. I was one of five women who gravitated towards each other; Susan Baxter ‘Bennett’, Kirsty Hudson (Willer), Kathryn Mace, Lynn Jinks (Garnett) and me. We had shared sense of humour, feminists’ lens and lived experiences – all of us wanted to facilitate workshops with women and make a show in response.

We reached out to the then Regional Women & Girls Network a grassroots network created to give support, share practices and agitate for the women and girls they worked with.  My group was made up of intergenerational lesbians and they/we shared ‘coming out’ stories.   As I write I remember I also worked with parents of lesbians and gay men, some shared their sorrow and regret at their negative responses, rejection and shame.  A group of parents trying to make amends. I created a character to capture the voices in my group and the issues raised, thinking through what audiences might need to see, hear and consider.  My character was a mum of a young lesbian who was deceased and stuck in purgatory (for Catholic’s in the olden days it was the ‘waiting room’ to stop and consider any wrong doings, a place where you stayed if you had done wrong, before heaven or hell – it’s been discontinued now but back then it’s here we met Margaret).  As Margaret saw her life journey reflected back, she was forced to stop and consider her actions and reactions. Through this story telling the voices of the group and the parents lens was captured – the nuances of our lived experiences for those who are LGBT (it was the mid to late 90’s, Section 28 was enacted on 24^th May 1988 which stated that ‘a local authority shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promotion homosexuality’ or ‘promote the teaching in any school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a presented family relationship’. It wasn’t repealed until 2003.  

We each wrote a monologue in response to our individual groups then we brought them all together to showcase their stories and introduced each to the other.  With their endorsement we went on to devise a play, we called it After Her Death, and it was about five daughters haunted by the dead mothers (later adapted to four daughters and mothers for the tour). Two Acts, with the second being a Talent Contest, the formula Brechtian, feminist and delivered to an audience as if they were in a nightclub.  There was no fourth wall and our audiences were invited up on stage to showcase their talent.

Live Theatre gave us a free night and Cap-a-Pie sponsored the next.  The audience was fit to burst.  Our groups, youth and community, invited and others, friends and chosen families all gathered.  It was now when we were encouraged to set up professionally so we could tour the show, the need and ask from our audiences and communities.  Two of the five took the mantle, and the play was adapted to a four handed and toured in 1999/2000/2001.  I have spent this afternoon looking at our first annual review.  I stop on the comment written which says, ‘lessons learnt along the way – such as never tour with the biggest, heaviest most cumbersome set and lighting rig you could ever find!’.  Funny how you can forget the pain and do it all over again.   And we did.  During the tour of After Her Death survivors of domestic violence and abuse asked us if we would create a show about their lived experiences, using the same style, popular theatre, funny, thought provoking and accessible. Falling Knives was the next show, and we will visit it in the next blog. 

But I wanted to take a moment to once again thank the first groups that put their trust in Open Clasp:

It’s clear from reading ‘After Her Death’ that the heart of Open Clasp’s work has been in the foundations of the company from day one. I can see the methodology on the page, a process that I now see in rooms filled with women. I can hear the voices of direct experience, handled with care and compassion. I can feel the story being pushed by a political and feminist lens.  It shows me that although the intersectionality of the issues develop and change over time; the co-creation, politics and heart have always been the core of Open Clasp’s work.

Catrina

RIP 2013-2024