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A double act is arguing about its opening number. There's an act to revive, a routine to get right and, somewhere underneath the familiar business of making an audience laugh, a life that deserves a proper hearing.
That's the starting point for It’s a Wonderful Us, the touring production from The Lawnmowers Independent Theatre Company and Murmur Theatre. Drawing on the comic traditions of Morecambe and Wise and Tommy Cooper, and the imaginative world of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, it opens its autumn tour at Northern Stage in Newcastle on Saturday 17 October.
For MagNorth readers, there's another reason to pay attention: the way this work has been made.
Written and directed by Steve Gilroy, the production was co-created over six years with Lawnmowers performers Andrew McLeod and Andrew Robson. Workshops, interviews and conversations with the performers and their families helped shape a play that combines personal testimony with imaginative storytelling.
Six years gives some indication of the patience behind it. The creative process continued through illness and isolation, according to Gilroy. Relationships and experiences had time to inform the work.
“At its heart this is a play about what we inherit - and what we choose to leave behind,” he says.
Based in Pelaw, Gateshead, The Lawnmowers describes itself as a company led by and for people with learning disabilities. Its 40th anniversary provides a chance to recognise the sustained work behind that description: creating productions, developing artists and making space for experiences that deserve to shape our cultural life.
McLeod and Robson’s co-creator credits matter. They identify an artistic contribution to the making of the play, as well as the work audiences will see on stage.
When we discuss participation in culture, it's useful to be precise about what that means. There's attending a performance. There's performing in one. There's also helping determine the story, its perspective and the form it takes. Each involves a different relationship with the work.
This production’s long collaboration puts that last question firmly in view. Who has the opportunity, time and support to help make theatre?
On stage, McLeod plays Darren and Robson plays Ginger. Their variety partnership is caught in endless rehearsal until Ginger proposes bringing Darren’s life into the act.
Revisiting recordings with his father opens up a family history, with questions about love, constraint and the experiences that have shaped him. Jake Jarratt completes the cast as Scott.
The premise makes room for comedy alongside difficult family material. A double act depends on the relationship between its performers: timing, friction, familiarity and the possibility that one person will take the other somewhere unexpected. Here, that theatrical relationship becomes a route into a story about identity and being heard.
The performances will reveal how those ambitions come together. But the prospect is compelling: an original play built through sustained collaboration, drawing on lived experience and a shared appetite for making theatre.
For audiences across our patch, the autumn tour creates several opportunities to encounter it. For the wider cultural sector, it offers a reason to look closely at the conditions that allow artists to develop work over time.
Forty years of a theatre company, six years of making a production, and an evening in which a double act might finally get beyond its opening number. There's a great deal of northern cultural life contained in that invitation.
Northern Stage, Newcastle Saturday 17 October 7.30pm
Friargate Theatre, York Friday 23 and Saturday 24 October 7.30pm
Queen’s Hall, Hexham Thursday 12 November 7.30pm
Arts Centre Washington Thursday 19 November 7.30pm
Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough Tuesday 24 November 7.45pm
