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New Writing:
Speaking to the City
New writing has always sat at the heart of the Everyman and in particular, the development of local documentary plays (often musicals) that reflected current events. The first of these, The Mersey Funnel (1967), marked the opening of the Catholic Cathedral. Unwilling to be overshadowed by the new building up the road, the Everyman built their own cathedral on stage and produced what Director Ian Taylor described as ‘a riotous mixture of a show to match the revolutionary design of the cathedral.’ Developed through improvisation and 70 interviews with local people, the show faced its own challenges, not least trying to find costumes for several six-foot-tall nuns who in one scene were guarding a valuable necklace sent by the Pope.
Under Alan Dosser’s leadership (1970-1976), the theatre developed its popular house style infused with comedy, music, irreverence and, above all else, localism. His final production, Under New Management (1976) by Chris Bond and the company, was based on interviews with workers at the Fisher-Bendix factory in Kirkby who were running the factory as a workers co-operative following years of mismanagement. As Stephen Dixon noted in The Guardian it would ‘be hard to write an overtly serious play about what happened at the Fisher-Bendix factory, a place where at one point eight stainless steel sinks were produced at a cost of £25,000 each due to appalling inefficiency and squandering on the part of the management’ (6th June 1975). For Dosser, the goal was to give the real people fighting for their jobs ‘a bit of power.’
Kirkby returned to the stage in 1978 with Love and Kisses from Kirkby by Chris Bond, then Artistic Director. In line with the city’s drive to attract tourists, the Everyman presented a musical history of Kirkby, asking the audience to watch the sun set behind the ski run, advising them to bring their crash helmet. Dubbed by the Echo as a ‘midsummer night’s panto-cum-documentary,’ it was a hit with audiences but sparked protests from the council which demanded the theatre withdraw the poster claiming it was detrimental to the town’s image – despite the fact that the council had indeed built a 150-foot ski slope that was never used and was abandoned amidst rumours that it had been built back-to-front.
More controversy followed with The Girls in the Pool (1982), Claire Luckham’s play about a typists’ strike where women were fighting for re-grading which featured an all-female cast with the bosses played by moveable coat stands. The Chief Executive of Liverpool council denounced it, declaring he could ‘hardly think of a less suitable subject on which to base a play.’
Over the years, the Everyman has shifted away from documentary plays but has continued to produce locally inspired work. The first new play after the theatre re-opened was Andrew Cullen’s Scouse (1997), a comedy of terrors, with Liverpool declaring independence from the rest of the UK and the family debating whether Liverpool was a city worth staying in or fleeing from. Gemma Bodinetz’s first venture in directing at the Everyman was Jonathan Harvey’s Guiding Star (1998) about Hillsborough. As Artistic Director, Bodinetz commissioned new plays under the banner ‘Made in Liverpool’ which spoke to local concerns – from Tony Green’s The Kindness of Strangers (2004) for the theatre's 40th birthday to Unprotected (2006) which returned to a more documentary/verbatim style to tell the story of the murder of local street sex workers and present arguments about the creation of legal zones. Movingly, the play finished with the recorded voice of Anne Marie Foy, murdered on Crown Street near the Royal Liverpool Hospital before the play was finished. Most recently two plays, Cherry Jezebel by Jonathan Larkin (2022) and Tell Me How It Ends by Tash Dowd (2024) have reflected on stories about being gay in the city, one focusing on drag and one, set in 1987, about AIDS.
