CityLife

Monkey see, Monkey do

A Song For The Lovers

MONKEYWOOD Theatre Company co-founders, Sarah McDonald Hughes, from Flixton, and Francesca Waite, from Didsbury, met as theatre A-level students at Xaverian sixth form college in Rusholme and formed the company with fellow actor Martin Gibbons, from Teesside, in 2003. 

“We were trained actors who wanted to do really good work and were finding there wasn't any out there, at least not that anybody wanted to see us for,” reflects Sarah.

“So we made this company and suddenly found that we had to become not only actors but stage managers, had to do marketing and all of that.

No organ-grinder

We saw ourselves as monkeys – no organ-grinder, just the monkeys – and so we wanted a name that would reflect that. This way, we get to choose the work that we want to do.”

A Song For The Lovers is a funny, compelling story about an unlikely friendship and an impossible evening.

Over the course of one night in a deserted club in Manchester, three desperate characters search for an escape route that is drifting further and further away from them.

“When I was training I never, ever thought that I would be a writer as well,” Sarah laughs. “I was very determined that I was going to be an actor and I didn't think about anything else.

We advertised as a company for new plays and there was an overwhelming response but, not to be mean, a lot of them were just not very good.

Complex

So I thought 'well, I'll have a go then,' and this play was the result. It was a story I really wanted to tell, about an adult character who has quite a significant disability, although that's never really been addressed.

“So, it's about him being, basically, just about able to look after himself and not needing any input from Social Services or anything like that.

But he really struggles to make connections with other people and what interested me was how relationships between people are always more complex than they seem.

This character has pretty much run away from his life and there are also another couple of characters who are also desperate for different reasons.

It's about them meeting at a time when they're all, I suppose, quite on the edge of themselves and desperate about the connections they make and about their relationships.

“24/7 said you *could send 10 pages' so I wrote 10 pages, because I thought *well, they're not going to take it, anyway'. So when they rang me up and said *we're very interested, can we have a look at the rest?' I had to really go to work.”

Emerging

That was back in 2006 and this new production is part of The Lowry's new Studio Season, celebrating some of the best new and emerging performance companies from the north west and beyond.

“We're often perceived as being somewhat *impenetrable', especially amongst smaller, regionally-based companies because we present world-renowned large-scale companies, such as the Kirov, the RSC and Opera North,” says Porl Cooper, Theatres Programmer at The Lowry.

“The 200-seat Studio theatre gives us the perfect opportunity to take risks and this season we're broadening the spectrum of work being presented in there.

"We're offering a platform to showcase work that's smaller in scale, younger in years, or has a less well-established profile."

“This particular play is the first play I wrote and after we put it on at 24/7, I started to write more and for other companies, such as Action Transport,” says Sarah.

Workshopped

“But we were always planning to come back to this play and, having done a lot more writing, what I wanted to do was to rewrite it and develop it.

“I'd done work collectively with theatre-makers in the meantime, too, so I wanted it to not just be me sitting in a room writing. So we workshopped the play and went through a collective rewriting process.

 “The key themes are the same, the characters are the same, the point of the play, I suppose, is the same but it is really quite different. It has been rewritten to such an extent that I don't think there are even any bits of dialogue left from the version people may have seen at 24/7.

“You have to be not precious at all because these are creative people and you're trying to get their input. Surely that can only make it better, so why would you resist it?

"We've also got a new director Jo Fisher, who's also an actor on Waterloo Road. So that stops us, as actors, wanting just to modify the old version. It feels like we're rehearsing a new play!”

A Song For The Lovers is at the Lowry Studio from Thursday until October 11.