Green door what’s that secret you’re keeping?

This article was originally published for BOLDtext Playwrights

According to the 1956 hit song, ‘there’s an old piano and they play it hot behind the green door’. It’s a tune that was running through my head as I approached a battered green door in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. However, rather than finding a smoke-filled speakeasy, I discovered an entirely different world of wonders: a perfectly preserved 130-year-old jewellery manufactory.

It’s a typical Birmingham experience. In every part of the city you can wander down a seemingly half-abandoned street, only to stumble across something extraordinary. In this case it’s the Grade II* listed Alabaster & Wilson factory on Legge Lane. It’s also typical of Birmingham that it’s a name barely anyone recognises, even though the company made jewellery for such lofty figures as Princess Diana and the Queen. The business closed four years ago, not because they didn’t have customers, but because an offer was made on the building and almost everyone working there was due to retire.

However, one jeweller remains. Patrick Lambert continues to work at the top of the stairs on the first floor, acting as a kind of custodian while a future for the building it sought. He is a master craftsman and is also far too humble, which in itself is another typically Brummie quality. Patrick very generously spent about three hours showing me around the factory, regaling me with stories of its past, and letting me into some of the secrets of the trade. What struck me most was when he breezily admitted that “nobody gets rich making jewellery”. In fact, he’s often had to work second jobs in pubs or at the airport to make ends meet.

Patrick Lambert, the last jeweller at Alabaster & Wilson

It’s this I hope to distil into my 10-minute play for Gem of a Place, which I’m thrilled to say will be performed inside the Alabaster & Wilson factory, a building that is rarely open to the public. Without gritty, unprepossessing streets like Legge Lane and without brilliant unsung artisans just like Patrick, London jewellers wouldn’t have made their profits and the great and the good wouldn’t have been able to sparkle and shine. And that’s typically Brummagem too.

So don’t miss this opportunity to go behind the green door and discover an extraordinary hidden world for yourself. Tickets are on sale now!

BOOK your TICKETS HERE

Catch Gem of a Place by BOLDtext Playwrights on 9, 10, 11, 16, 17 & 18 September at 11:30am, 2pm & 5pm.

It is presented as part of the Birmingham 2022 Festival and Birmingham Heritage Week.

The Joy of Research

This article was originally published on the BOLDtext Playwrights website.

For me, one of the great priviledges of being a writer is time spent doing research. In most walks of life if you rocked up on someone’s doorstep and asked to nose around, they’d most likely tell you where to go. Explain you’re a writer, however, and they’ll happily share their life story! What follows can subvert or confirm expectations. It can get you out of narrative cul-de-sacs and open up brand new ideas. Best of all it can give you that nugget of authenticity that brings a piece of writing to life. Here are my top five research experiences:

1. Margate

In 2009 building work had started on the Turner Contemporary art gallery in Margate. Named after the painter J.M.W Turner, a regular visitor, its construction was intended to regenerate the delapidated seaside town. The moment I stepped out of the train station I knew why Turner loved the place so much: the sweep of the beach; the vast horison; the crisp almost irridescent light. Ten minutes later I was standing in a joke shop, in an otherwise abandoned, grafitti-covered, arcade, interviewing its owners. What use was a fancy art gallery, they wondered? They’d rather the council spent the £17.5 million on doing up the municipal pool. That pretty much became the essence of the play I wrote for the town’s Theatre Royal: even if art can regenerate an area, who exactly is the regeneration for?

2. Royal Military Academy Sandhurt

Daniel Hebden-Lloyd, a character in The Archers, was about to embark on officer training for the army, so I was sent down to Sandhurst to find out what it would involve. I tried to go with an open mind but, having been raised a Quaker pacifist, I didn’t expect it to be an easy job. It was also only a few years after the Iraq War and I couldn’t resist asking a colonel what he thought about it. He expressed distaste towards Tony Blair, but nonetheless said it was his duty to follow the orders of Her Majesty’s government. I still struggle with the idea of obeying orders you may personally disagree with, but I also know I’d make a terrible soldier. I may not have been won over, but having seen the discipline and commitment involved, I came away grateful to the people who are willing to sacrifice their moral autonomy, so that I have the luxury of keeping mine.

3. Coalition

In 2011 I was working on a play about the Liberal Democrats’ participation in the Conservative-led coalition. I spent time shadowing an MP, interviewed the Lib Dem Foreign Office minister in his grand departmental office, and – most interestingly – spent a day at the party’s HQ. It was like being in an unfunny version of The Thick Of It. While the world was accusing the Lib Dems of selling out, they were actually busy culling staff, having lost their opposition subsidy when they went into government. Meanwhile, a labyrinthine civil service decision-making system meant that those who had kept their jobs couldn’t communicate with their own ministers, having been subsumed in the bureaucratic Whitehall machine. Since then I’ve refused to indulge in conspiracy theories. The truth is, there is no grand plan. Most politicians are just trying to survive the day.

4. Women’s Aid

While researching another Archers storyline, I spoke to a caseworker for the domestic abuse charity Women’s Aid. I always find these types of interviews awkward. You want to be respectful towards the topic – and the real-life people involved – but you’re also looking for an exciting, attention-grabbing story. I needn’t have worried as if you put some of the examples I was given into a drama, you simply wouldn’t be believed. One such story was about a man who gaslit his partner into thinking she was putting on weight by replacing the size labels in all of her clothes. It seems trite to say that truth is stranger than fiction, but by attempting to dramatise an issue convincingly (and unsensationally) you can end up not dramatising some of the truly despicable things that actually occur.

5. Jewellery Quarter

Which brings me to BOLDtext’s latest project, ‘Gem of a Place’, a theatrical tour of Birmingham historic Jewellery Quarter. I’ve been researching Alabaster & Wilson, a high-end manufacturer that closed five year’s ago. One of the things I love about the Quarter is that you can push open a shabby, unprepossessing door and find amazing things inside. In this case, I found Patrick Lambert, a brilliant craftsman who still works in the otherwise empty factory. Patrick very generously spent a whole afternoon showing me around – including the WWII bomb shelter in the basement. Lying in the corner was a rusty fire warden’s helmet, untouched for eighty years. Nothing beats the simple pleasure of meeting extraordinary people and glimpsing into hidden places. You really couldn’t make it up.

Tim Stimpson

The play that oh-so nearly went wrong

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Way back in the heady pre-pandemic days of 2019, I was basking in the satisfaction of another sell-out run of Behind Bars: Ghosts of the Lock-Up. A site-specific production by writers’ collective BOLDtext (of which I’m a member), it had already had a successful run the year before, and had returned, this time with me taking the director’s reins from Jo Gleave.

In the audience during one performance was the then curator of Soho House. No, not the members’ club London, but the meeting place of the far more influential Lunar Society, in Handsworth, Birmingham. We were invited to put on a similar show, bringing to life ‘lunar-ticks’ like 18th Century industrialist Matthew Boulton and doctor-philosopher Erasmus Darwin. The show would lead the audience through the very rooms where so much of the modern world had first been imagined and invented.

Good idea, right? COVID-19 clearly didn’t agree. Planned for early summer 2020, it quickly became clear that the show as envisaged wouldn’t be possible. To make matters more complicated, with many museum staff sadly being laid-off, the curator of Soho House vanished. The staff that remained were (understandably) more concerned with how to get their venues back open safely, than dealing with the frivolous problems of how to put on a play.

The Arts Council had a different view, however. We’d already been awarded funding, and as things began to open up, ACE (also, understandably) wanted long-postponed productions to get up and running again. This was a considerable problem with Soho House remaining closed (at the time of writing it still is). Instead of leading the audience around the building, we reimagined the play as a garden party, taking place in the grounds, picnic and all. The audience would be able to sit in socially-distanced bubbles and we’d be able to get the show on the road.

Fantastic idea, right? This time it wasn’t just COVID that didn’t agree; the weather had something to say as well. If we’d known it was going to be an outdoor production, we might have budgeted for a marquee or some sort of awning. Sadly, we didn’t have that luxury. By now it was summer 2021, and the heavens frequently opened – particularly when any of our actors attempted to say their lines. For all but two performances, the show was forced into the museum’s cafe/educational space. Surely, things couldn’t get any worse? You guessed it. Halfway through two of the four actors got pinged and had to self-isolate.

Two years of planning, and every effort made to adapt the show to the circumstances, and it ended up with the producer (Julia Wright) and director (Janet Steel) reading their lines next to the hatch to the kitchen!

Despite everything though, the show did go on. Our saving graces were the tenacious determination of the company (including Katy Stephens, Simran Kular, and Adaya Henry) and the understanding of our very generous audience. Even my play about non-conformist minister and inventor of fizzy water, Joseph Priestley, went off without a hitch, despite my efforts to overcomplicate it with a live experiment involving chalk and acid. For once the overused office adage seems apt: you don’t have to be a lunatic to work here, but it helps!