Current accounts - Upstart, Terrorism and Tom Mansfield

Published Friday 21 April 2006 at 11:20 by Nick Awde

Difficult issues surrounding terrorism are being addressed head on by a theatre company determined to bring those affected together, discovers Nick Awde

With countless questions still unanswered over the fatal shooting by police of Jean Charles de Menezes last year, a London-based theatre company has committed itself to developing a provocative piece of urban drama. Upstart’s 22 July Project examines London’s response to the latest wave of terrorist bomb attacks and asks how can an event such as the killing of the Brazilian electrician happen?

Though the project is a continuously evolving work, director Tom Mansfield says the underlying theme will remain unchanged. “We are looking at the context of London after the 7/7 bombings as well as after 9/11 and the way life has changed for Londoners, particularly ordinary Londoners who don’t look like nice, white, middle-class people.”

Mansfield is a logical choice to bring the story to the stage. Born in south London, he has lived in the city for most of his life and the killing at Stockwell tube station had a strong personal resonance. “I was living in Stockwell at the time and I travelled through the station every day. There was that constant reminder of the shooting every day, made particularly acute by knowing that it is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse parts of the city.”

It all began when Oval House Theatre got in touch with Upstart after reading an article about the company’s plans - Mansfield is joint artistic director along with writer/director Steven Lally. “We organised a week’s workshop with writer Dawn King and a group of actors in February where we looked at the media and other reports of what supposedly happened on July 22 - There was this guy who was wearing a big bulky coat. He jumped over the barriers. He looked like he had wires dangling from his back - all this has turned out to be utterly untrue and so that was one way in. We worked on a reconstruction of the events of that day, focusing on the idea of the confusion and the low-level panic that people seemed to be having post-7/7.”

The workshop ended on February 22 with a presentation to an audience including members of de Menezes’ family. Also present were members of the local community, many of them Portuguese or Brazilian, as well as representatives of the Justice4Jean campaign. Upstart did 20 minutes of theatre, followed by an hour and 40 minutes of post-show discussion with the audience.

“The forthrightness of people’s views and the fear that they have of the police was striking,” Mansfield recalls. “But a Met police officer was also present and it was interesting what she had to say about the policemen involved in the shooting and what had happened to them in terms of institutionalised culture and the way they would be living with what they had done.”

Speaking through an interpreter, one of de Menezes’ cousins said that he sympathised with the policemen. “There was an extremely interesting moment of semi-reconciliation between these people who had a connection with Jean, something I hadn’t expected to see. So the idea of discussing the issues afterwards was very fruitful and we now want to use a forum-theatre type of discussion. So we’re still acting out events but we are getting audience members to contribute ideas.”

Upstart has been going since 2002, founded by Mansfield and Lally shortly after they both graduated from Birmingham University. Most of their work focuses on finding and promoting new writers who are usually on new writers’ programmes at places such as the Royal Court and Soho theatres but who are not necessarily getting assimilated into the mainstream. Events include short plays nights and rehearsed readings under the banner of Brief Chronicles at a variety of venues across London.

“We’re not based at any one theatre, we float around. We’ve done quite a lot of work with the Etcetera in Camden Town - where we did the Undiscovered bill of new writing - and most recently the Oval House, which has been very exciting.”

The 22 July Project is a step in a different direction since part of the writing process will come from workshops with community groups within Stockwell itself. “Part of the project is about reaching out, making contact through theatre with people who wouldn’t necessarily come to the theatre. Take the police officer in the Oval House audience - it was the second piece of theatre she had ever seen in her life.”

With another play in the pipeline - The Evening of the Fifteenth, written by Lally - Mansfield is proud that Upstart is constantly expanding. “We’ve got a lot of voices in the room, which is fantastic. Plus a great group of young actors although we don’t have anyone playing Jean, deliberately so, since the project is about us all.

“The temptation is to dramatise only what happened on the day and that is it. They did this on Panorama and the drama-docs that are coming out. But I think theatre can do something else, which is create a context. Here, after all, you have an innocent guy in the city who tries to make his life work, send some money home to mum and dad and then becomes a victim of the very people who are trying to protect him.”