Stephen M Hornby
Stephen M Hornby dramatises archives for stage and screen, revivifying the past and finding forgotten stories that demand to be heard. He is the Artistic Director of Inkbrew Productions, his multiple award-winning creative company based in Manchester. They specialise in making LGBTQ+ heritage performances working in theatres, galleries, museums and embedded in communities bringing the queer past to life to illuminate the present.
He is a lecturer at the University of Salford leading classes on playwriting, scriptwriting and directing. He is honoured to have been the first LGBT+ History Month Playwright In Residence since 2015.
Productions
2022 – The Day the World Came to Huddersfield
Writing Festival Theatre: “A Very Victorian Scandal: The Press”
There were several elements to the puzzle: an ambitious man who wanted to become Chief Constable, an unprecedented press frenzy that spread across the world and a trial that never was. I was working through the papers that Jeff Evans, my historical adviser, had given me in search of a smoking gun, something to link all of these events together, beyond circumstance and suspicion.
In between the raid on the drag ball and the trial of the 47 men arrested a few days later, Chief Constable Pallin was replaced by Acting Chief Constable Wood (a man as keen on policing morality as he was on policing the streets). The story of the raid went from being covered by the local newspapers, to regionals, and on to nationals, with several illustrated special weekend editions covering the events, and eventually on to the American press. It was a sensation. Yet, when the men came to trial, no criminal charges were ever brought. They were bound over for a surety which some could pay and others could not, landing them in prison. In a sense, this was the real scandal of the whole episode. There had to be a smoking gun somewhere
I read the self-penned memoirs of the detective who led the raid, Jerome Caminada. The case was easily the biggest of his career in terms of press coverage it brought him. Despite two lengthy volumes of memoirs, some detailing relatively minor crimes, Caminada never mentions it once. Nor did he ever speak publicly about the case, despite retiring from the Police into a life in local politics. Was he deliberately choosing to remain silent about the love that dared not speak its name on moral grounds (he was a committed Catholic)?
But then Caminada mentions, in some detail, other forms of sexual offending in his memoir and all kinds of (as he would see it) illegal and deviant behaviour. Was he perhaps ashamed of his role in some way? Had there been some connection between Caminada’s well-timed raid and the appointment of a new Chief Constable wanting to be known for his tough policing of sexual morality? The Manchester City Police had been informed of a similar ball some years earlier, but had taken no action. Was the imperative to act now being driven by an Acting Chief Constable keen to prove himself to a Watch Committee who wanted a crackdown on any perception of Manchester as a city of vice?
If that was the case, and I had nothing yet to prove it was, then it was a monumental failure. The local press reporting of the raid could perhaps be relied upon. There is evidence of formal and informal connections between police forces and journalists at every level in the system. But the unexpected thing was the expediential growth in interest in the story.
I could imagine a Watch Committee that was pleased with a headline the day after the raid showing that Manchester showed no tolerance for men behaving indecently with each other. I could also readily imagine their horror when the story spread and spread, associating Manchester and unnatural vices for day after day after day across the North, then across England, then across the world. And their dread at anticipating the appearance of 47 men at Magistrates Court only to be remitted to Crown Court for lengthy trials which might mean the story went on for months and months. Was this why the case collapsed at Magistrates Court on the first and only hearing?
he raid had been a large and expensive and very public Police operation. There was the sworn evidence not just of the respected Caminada, but of other constables, all attesting to the depravity of the ball. But, in the end, no criminal charges were laid and the men were bound over. It was extraordinary. Had the Watch Committee now desperately tried to end the prosecution before any embarrassing trials could begin, which might mean detailed testimonies and a painfully prolonging of the scandal?
As I started writing, I had some key facts around the replacement of one Chief Constable with another, about a press appetite for the story that no one could control, about Caminada’s mysterious silence and about the perplexing puzzle of the trials that never were. I may not have the smoking gun, but I certainly had the bullets it has been loaded with.
I choose to use Caminada and Wood as two of the three characters in the piece and play out the tensions of over the trial, Wood’s promotion and the control of the press between them. But I needed some way to bind those stories together and bring them into the action on stage in each scene. A journalist was the obvious choice for a third character. I invented Henry Newman as the embodiment of the new journalism that was emerging during the period, and made him the person who Caminada uses to first leak the raid story too. Newman, of course, had to be secretly homosexual. He is then faced with either printing the story of a lifetime and betraying people he knows, or not printing the story and potentially outing himself. This formed the basis of the first draft of “AVVS: The Press”.
The dramatist in me wanted to make the stakes for Newman even higher. I knew from the research that one of the men arrested, Ernest Parkinson, worked as a minstrel. What if Ernest was a female impersonator, Newman’s secret lover, and unbeknownst to Newman was at the ball? Now there were two biographical characters, one invented character and one character based on a real person, but with some invented biography.
I had a story that was three parts fact, two parts informed speculation and one part pure invention. That felt like the right balance to illuminate the issues of the police relationship with the press, whilst also conveying the story in a 30 minute piece with four actors in a library on a Saturday afternoon on St. Valentine ’s Day.
Photo credits: Nicolas Chinardet (except for poster image)
Writing Festival Theatre: “The Burnley Buggers’ Ball”
I thought I was writing a play mostly about Ray Gosling, the famous broadcaster from the 1970s. Jeff Evans and I had been discussing what to do to mark the 50th. Jeff had found the forgotten story of the first attempt to open an LGBT centre in the UK. It was a struggle that began with the 1967 Act and came to fruition in an East Lancashire mill town at the beginning of the 1970s. As everyone kept saying to me throughout the project, “Who knew?”
Ray Gosling chaired a meeting entitled ‘Homosexuals & Civil Liberty’ in Burnley Central Library on 30th July 1971 at 8pm. The local press commented on how well he chaired a confrontational meeting at which the atmosphere was described as ‘electric’. This meeting is now becoming reassessed as the birth of the civil rights movement for gay men in Britain, the moment the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) and Gay Liberation Front (GLF) came together; the moment of transition from reasoned debate to civil rights demand which literally occurs in the meeting. As Ray was the chair of the meeting, and a well known figure, it seemed reasonable to research him first as the starting point for writing the play.
Dramatising something that is in living memory was new ground for LGBT History Month. I could talk to people who remember the meeting, people who were at the meeting even. I couldn’t speak to Ray though. But there is a wonderful legacy to draw from, the documentaries, the radio programmes and his very own archive at Nottingham Trent University. Copies of Ray’s papers in relation to the meeting and his diary for the period were kindly provided by the archive, perused and duly considered. One of the actors I work with regularly met Ray. She was a big fan of his work and when she approached him and was unable to focus her appreciation into specific memories of a specific programmes, was witheringly dismissed by Ray in a textbook example of how not to respond to a tongue-tied fan.
After many hours listening to him present material, I have to say, of varied quality, I was struck by several things, conclusions that underpin the characterisation of the Ray that I wanted to write. He was very principled and cared about ordinary people. He didn’t suffer fools at all and always thought he knew best, even when he palpably didn’t. He was a bit of a blagger and a lot of a visionary. He probably wasn’t very easy to like, but he would be someone you respected, someone who would teach you valuable life lessons, someone you would always remember. His judgment may have been off sometimes and he may have drunk too much, but there was a fire, a kind of nobility and a strong instinct for what’s important in life and what’s at the core of people.
I knew Ray worked closely with Allan Horsfall, who was also at the meeting in Burnley but didn’t speak. Allan is the grandfather of LGBT rights in the UK. Allan’s silence at the meeting was problematic. How could I stay true to his silence, but also honour a man who was so important in making the 1967 partial decriminalisation happen? There’s also less of Allan, in terms of archive. The recordings and films of him that do exist show someone who is self-conscious and only gives clues to the man within. At this point in my research, I felt a bit despondent. I knew a lot about Ray’s character and a bit about Allan’s, but essentially, all I had was four men sat on a podium talking for an hour in a stuffy room in Burnley. It wasn’t the most promising premise for a dramatisation.
The something wonderfully serendipitous happened. I was working on another project and by chance met Michael Steed. Michael is, as far as we know, the only person living who spoke from the platform at the meeting. He kindly agreed to being interviewed over dinner and replayed an account of the meeting I had read before. My historical adviser on the project was Peter Scott-Presland, the author of the wonderful book “Amiable Warriors”, a multi-volume on-going record of the history of CHE. He had interviewed Michael, amongst many others, about the meeting and Michael gave pretty much the same account as he was giving me over dinner. There was a pivotal moment when the GLF somehow took over and threw away the procedural order of the CHE, zapping the meeting. Accounts of exactly what happened vary. Some say Andrew Lumsden from the GLF zapped the meeting, some say Ray picked up on what Andrew had said and that it was him who zapped the meeting. Whoever it was, the meeting was zapped:
“We are speaking as if there are no homosexuals in this room and only five in the whole of Lancashire. I want everyone who is gay to stand up. Stand up now if you’re gay.”
So went the zap…roughly. Again accounts vary but somewhere between one third and two thirds of the room stands. Peter’s account implies that, of course, all the platform speakers, Ray and Allan and Michael, all stood. A couple of glasses of wine into dinner, Michael suddenly seizes my arm and with a look of deepest sincerity says one devastating line, “Of course, the truth is none of us stood; no one on the platform stood.” How could the brave, pioneering, ceaselessly campaigning Allan Horsfall not have stood? History just changed.
To me as a writer, the moments when people behave in unexpected ways are always the most interesting. I would’ve assumed that Allan would have stood, but here was an eye witness, a man who was on the panel with him at the meeting, telling me he didn’t. There was my play. There was the way in to the material. The central question of the piece became: why didn’t Allan Horsfall come out when called upon to do so? And suddenly the play was about Allan and not about Ray.
Though the accounts of the meeting are contested, if Michael’s account is accurate, then we have a profound new insight into the events of 30th July 1971. And the process of writing a historical play has disrupted the published historical version of events. Dramatising history can change history and turn upon a few words in one sentence.
All other photo credits: Nicolas Chinardet
“The Adhesion of Love” announced as 2019 national heritage premiere
LGBT History Month is thrilled to annouce Inkbrew Productions “The Adhesion of Love” as the 2019 national heritage premiere for LGBT History Month. The play will be touring venues in Greater Manchester & Lancashire from 9 February to 31 May.
Written by multi-award winning playwright Stephen M Hornby, The Adhesion of Love tells the extraordinary true story of how an architect’s assistant from Bolton crossed the Atlantic in 1891 to meet the visionary queer poet Walt Whitman. The production builds on previous National Heritage Premiere successes: The Burnley Buggers Ball & Burnley’s Lesbian Liberator (2017); Mister Stokes: The Man-Woman of Manchester & Devils in Human Shape (2016); and A Very Victorian Scandal (2015).
In 1885, John W Wallace, a working-class man from Bolton, sets up the Eagle Street ‘College’, a book group that celebrates his love for Walt Whitman’s poetry. Attracting a small group of like-minded men, Wallace embarks on a journey of spiritual and sexual self-discovery through Whitman’s words. When Wallace arrives in America six years later and meets his literary hero face-to-face, he is forced to confront the true nature of the intimacy the college members are seeking. On his return to Bolton, Wallace is unsure how to express his new sexual and spiritual awakening within in the conservative confines of Victorian England.
Stephen M Hornby, playwright in residence to LGBT History Month, Artistic Director of Inkbrew Productions and writer of The Adhesion of Love says: “Bolton’s connection with Walt Whitman, whilst surprising, is documented and celebrated in Lancashire. But the true nature of the intimate meetings of men at the Eagle Street College has been kept hidden from view. The Adhesion of Love attempts to reclaim ‘comradely love’ as what I believe it really was – men attempting to express their true desire for one another in a sexually repressive society – as well as posing the question: if LGBT people had been able to write their own history, what would it look like?”
Matt Cain, writer of The Madonna of Bolton, patron of Bolton Pride and LGBT History Month, journalist and author says: “The Adhesion of Love is a gripping and fascinating play about a group of characters whose stories aren’t widely known but very much ought to be. It’s vital that this play is performed in Bolton, the town in which it’s largely set, not just to reclaim the area’s LGBT past but also to make all parts of the UK more LGBT-inclusive places to live in the present.”
Professor Sue Sanders, Chair and founder of LGBT History Month UK says: “George Orwell said: ‘The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.’ I founded LGBT History Month as LGBT people in all their diversity were still invisible, especially in the past. Theatre is a crucial part of LGBT History Month and enables people to learn, through the heart as well as the head. I’m thrilled that Stephen is back dramatising new and surprising LGBT history for our celebrations in 2019.”
2019 is also the bicentennial of Whitman’s birth and this full-length play offers an amazing new insight into his work and influence on the UK.
The Adhesion of Love is supported by Arts Council England, Superbia and LGBT History Month.
Festival Theatre 2017 – “The Burnley Buggers’ Ball” & “Burnley’s Lesbian Liberator”
2017 marked the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act 2017, which partially decriminalised male homosexuality in England and Wales. In 2007, the 40th anniversary saw two dramatisations to mark the ocassion, one about the Wolfenden Committee, and one about the Monatgu case. Consenting Adults on the BBC followed the deliberations of Lord Wolfenden as he chaired the Government committee set up to consider decriminalisation in 1957, and contrasted it with the story of his gay son. Channel Four offered A Very British Scandal a docudrama of the 1954 prosecution of some prominent upper middle-class men that led to calls for liberalisation and a book by one of the men, Peter Wildeblood, Against The Law. So, we needed something fresh for the 50th, something original and surprising.
We wanted to move the focus from London legislative processes on to what the new law meant for ordinary working-class people as they grappled with its implications. Jeff Evans, National Festival Coordinator for LGBT History Month, suggested that a small mill town in East Lancashire might hold the answer.
It turns out that in the 1970s, Burnley was the UK’s battleground for gay and lesbian rights, with two ground-breaking public struggles at either end of the decade. LGBT History Month commissioned two dramas from Inkbrew Productions to recreate this amazing forgotten history:
The Burnley Buggers’ Ball, by Stephen M Hornby, tells the story of a transformative public meeting held at Burnley Central Library in 1971. The meeting was about the right to open the UK’s first ever LGBT centre in old Co-Operative Society premises. It saw activists from the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in London join forces with activists from the North West in the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) for a rare public show of strength to take on local councillors and religious leader who were attempting to sabbotage them.
Burnley’s Lesbian Liberator, by Abi Hynes, dramatises the political activism of Mary Winter, a bus driver sacked for nothing more than wearing a ‘Lesbian Liberation’ badge and left unsupported by her trade union. She fought back against her employers in 1978 using a network of women’s groups across the UK, and staging a demo outside the Burnley Bus Station, one of the first public demands for equal right for LGBT workers.
The two plays were performed as a double bill and were created with professional actors, writers and directors working with volunteers and a series of local community partners: Burnley Youth Theatre, East Lancs LGBT, Burnley Mechanics, Burnley & Pendle Libraries and Hidden Histories. This was a unique multi-agency collaborative project for Burnley, and a first for LGBT History Month, dramatising events where they actually happened, adding another layer of historic resonance. Peter Scott-Preslandpublished “Amiable Warriors” in 2015, offering the first detailed historial account of the 1971 meeting, and agreed to act as a historical adviser to the project, as did Paul Fairweather who had written an LGBT heritage trail for Burnley invloving research into Mary Winter.
I gave an interview to Attitude magazine about the plays an extract from which is reproduced below:
“One of the biggest issues I had with dramatising the meeting was that Allan Horsfall, the grandfather of LGBT rights in the UK and one of this year’s heros, didn’t speak. Then, by an extraordinary coincidence, I met Michael Steed, who was one of the original speakers at the meeting and he agreed to an interview. Michael’s recall of events is incredibly detailed and what he decides to reveal to me for the first time is amazing. It challenges the published historical accounts of the meeting and it gives me a way to tell the whole story from Allan’s perspective.
And then I hear about Mary Winter. In 1978, Mary was a bus driver who was sacked for wearing a Lesbian Liberation badge to work. She turned to her union for support, but they refused to give it to her. Mary got Vanessa Redgrave involved in her struggle and staged a demo outside Burnley Bus Station (conveniently just behind the library).
I’ve written The Burnley Buggers’ Ball about the 1971 meeting and found the wonderful Abi Hynes to write Burnley’s Lesbian Liberator about the 1978 demo. The two plays form a double bill with an ensemble cast and take place both in the original sites of the events in Burnley.
If I had to find a cheesy strapline for these two plays it would be: They lost their fights so that we could win the war. But history rejects this compression. History is always complex and often contradictory. It is a way of forgetting as much as remembering, as any minority knows.”
Both plays were made possible with funding from the Arts Council of England and support from project patron Russell T Davies, tv writer and producer of such gems as Doctor Who, Queer As Folk and Cucumber, who said:
“This is precisely what LGBT History Month should be doing, uncovering hidden history, finding great stories and bringing them to life again for new audiences. And who knew they’d both be about Burnley! It’s marvellous to think of this mill town in East Lancashire being the centre of the struggle for UK gay and lesbian rights in the 1970s.”
Professor Sue Sanders, National Chair of LGBT History Month said:
“These are two little known but crucial events in UK LGBT history. These are the watershed moments of resistance, of self-assertion and collective organisation. These are the moments when we as a community first stood up in public and said, ‘NO’. Our work is to unbury these stories that prove that as a community we have been active, aware and clear about the work that needs to be done to ensure both individual rights and civil rights. The dramatisation of these stories brings to life the struggle that all minority communities have gone through to gain their rights.”
The plays were given six packed performances at Burnley Central Library, The Martin Harris Centre in Manchester and the The Bluecoat in Liverpool. Both plays were professionally filmed to enable audiences nationally to enjoy the performances.
Listen to Abi and Stephen’s BBC Radio 5 Interview Here
To read Stephens full article in Attitude click here. Download the promotional posters for the two plays by clicking the images below.
July 31, 2019
Festival Theatre 2016 “Mister Stokes: The Man-Woman of Manchester”
“A Very Victorian Scandal”, the first piece of Festival Theatre in 2015, had been so succsseful that it invited further dramatisations of hidden histories. However, some important lessons had also been learnt. “A Very Victorian Scandal” was essentially three one act plays, all of which were performed only once. This severely limited access to the live performances and many people were disappointed not to be able to see them. Additionally, staging three different plays, with different casts, sets and costumes in three different non-theatre venues on three successive days was also a real logistics and stage management nightmare.
2016 saw a conscious decision to commission a small cast, one act piece and perform it in a short run to address these concerns. There was also a deliberate decision to choose a trans story and to ensure that the lead trans role was performed by an excellent trans actor. The “T” in LGBT has sometimes, in the past, perhaps not been given the same focus in LGBT History Month as other groups. Recent interest in the story of a North West, Victorian trans pioneer seemed like fertile ground for dramatisation and Abi Hynes was selected to research and write a piece telling his story.
Harry Stokes drowned in the River Irwell in 1859. When his body was examined, he was found to be biologically female, though he had lived as a man and married twice. The term ‘Man-Woman’ was used in Victorian reports of the case and was in usuage then, along with terms such as ‘female husband’.
Based on the few records that exist, ‘Mister Stokes: The Man-Woman of Manchester’ is an insightful, colourful and moving play by Abi Hynes, which tells Harry’s story and the stories of the women who called him husband. In a time when today’s words did not exist to describe him, he managed to live a successful life in a hostile enivornment for many years. But, like many trans pioneers, he had been mostly forgotten….until LGBT History Month commissioned a new play based on his life.
Abi Hynes said ‘It’s a remarkable story and it’s incredible that it’s remained untold so far. The play was a wonderful opportunity to bring to light part of Manchester’s history that should, by all rights, be well-known, not just locally but nationally and internationally. It was great to have to start filling in the gaps in the record of Harry’s life and whilst speculative they are reasoned and reasonable creative and historical choices.”
‘Mister Stokes: The Man-Woman of Manchester’ was first performed in short run during February 2016 at the People’s History Museum, Manchester Metropolitan University and the Martin Harris Centre in Manchester. Professor Stephen Whittle and Dr Emma Vickers were the historical advisers on the development of the script. Joey Hateley played Harry Stokes and Jo Dakin played Harry’s two wives and the woman charged with laying out his body. It was professionally filmed to enable wider audiences to enjoy it. The show was made possible with a grant from the Arts Council of England and the gnerous support of private patrons.
Festival Theatre 2016: “Devils in Human Shape”
When approaching working with archive to create drama, there can be an unspoken preferencing of stage realism, of trying to recreate and represent people and events “as they were”, or in as close an approximation as the state of historical research at the time allows. I was keen that we also supported work that used archive as its starting point, but was bold and metaphorical with how it approached the dramatisation of that material. Tom Marshman approached us with a piece he was developing called “Devils in Human Shape” and we immediately saw the potential of the piece to demonstrate this and took on the producer role, successfully securing funding from the Arts Council of England to support further development and performances.
The piece used a selection of court cases dating back to 1732, detailing the crime of sodomy. Steve Poole acted as the historical advsier on the project. Five cases were identified as having the most theatrical mileage. Information was collated from a mixture of newspaper reports, letters and court records. This information was used to develop three black lace veiled gossip characters that tell the story of these people. The ‘gossipers’ told these true stories through innuendo and malicious extortion –this was a particular issue in the 18th Century. The title of the piece, ‘Devils in Human Shape”, was a name given to the sodomites of that time by a highly judgmental society, represented by these black lace characters.
The piece was twenty minutes long and worked with the language that is found in all of the original documents; the words are loaded with imagery. The three ‘gossipers’, dressed head to foot in black lace, stood, sat and mingled with the audience to reveal in-depth information about each case, at first abstracting pieces of information before later moving into telling deatiled narratives.
The piece played with the act of utterance and sound levels. Some of the stories and descriptions lent themselves to isolated whispered conversations or echoes but eventually these joined together to create a cacophony of voices. The gossipers operated as the malignant voice of society, which was intolerant and judgmental. They brought to life formal documents through a playful and sinister mode of communicating which could be more almost as a voice from the street of that time. The overall aim was to bring life to the documents that exist in record offices so that they became text that is visceral, delivered in a way that is uniquely immersive, where the mode of delivery matches the intention of the characters.
Here are some examples of the dramatised records:
“The night White arrived, an inn servant, Mary Lowland, heard a ‘rumbling noise’ in their room, so went in and found them ‘both undressed and lying in a very indecent posture, the said Cummings’s backside being in the said White’s lap. He was said to be a ‘vagrant’ and a ‘dirty boy’, by his landlord ‘out of a greedy desire to make double money out of his lodgings’.”
At the end of the piece there was a present-day recorded epilogue, a story detailing the specifics of a modern day hook-up. This straightforward, without shame, telling of a ‘Grinder’ smartphone app meeting by the historical researcher of the piece, highlighted the difference between the stories and the levels of social tolerance in the two periods of time. The piece was made shown at the V&A in London, Shrewsbury Arts Centre and the M-Shed in Bristol as part of each cities LGBT HM festvals.
Festival Theatre 2015: “A Very Victorian Scandal”
“A Very Victorian Scandal” (“AVVS”) was based on the events surrounding the largest raid on an LGBT venue in UK history. It has been christened “The UK’s Stoneweall”, and yet it happened nearly ninety years earlier in September 1880. The Manchester Police has been given information that a group of men were hiring a Temperance Hall in Hulme for the purposes of holding an all male fancy dress ball. The men had taken every opprotunity to disguise their intent, hiring the venue in the name of the Assistant Pawnbrookers of Manchester, covering over the windows and hiring a blind accordian player. Manchester’s leading detective, Jerome Caminada, however, was determined to arrest the men for sexual offences and raided the venue in the early hours, as some of the men started to leave. The resulting trial caused a national sensation, a scandal that emboided the hypocritical values of the Victorian era, and shook Manchester’s establishment to it’s core.
Jeff Evans, the project’s historical adviser, provided new historical material showing two sets of census data on all the men who were arrested and a wealth of press cuttings reporting the raid and subsequent progress of the case through the courts. Ric Brady and I reviewed this rich primary material and knew we had almost an embarrasment of riches in terms of what had dramatic protential. Our commission from LGBT History Month was to dramatise the story into a set of performances that would take place during the first national festvial of LGBT History from 13-15 February 2015.
We proposed three short plays, which could be enjoyed as stand alone pieces, as well as collectively. One piece would be a reconstruction of the likely entertainments that happened at the ball and would lead into a reconstruction of the raid itself (“AVVS: The Raid”). One piece would deal with the press reporting of the case (“AVVS: The Press”), and the final piece would deal with the trial of the men who were arrested (“AVVS: The Trial”).
We were delighted to secure funding for the project from the Arts Council of England and from our patron Russell T Davies, but as the project was greenlit, we started to have to face some problems:
- “AVVS: The Trial” was originally conceived of as an immersive piece that took place in extant Victorian Police cells and a Court. The practical difficulties of repeat it as part of a wider festival were impossible and meant that a new venue was needed. This also meant a refocus just on the trial itself and away from the immersive one-to-one elements.
- The Temperance Hall where the original raid took place no longer existed. So, a substitute venue was needed. It then became clear that both an emcee character and some narrative and dialogue would be required for the characters who were at the raid and would then appear in the other two pieces.
- The relationship between the press and the police contained a lot of circumstantial evidence for a level of collusion between the two and how this impacted on the trial, but there was no “smoking gun” in the documentary evidence to prove anything.
One of the main sites for the festival was the People’s History Museum, the national museum of democracy. The museum has a wonderful engine hall, with huge Victorian windows that look out on to the Manchester Civil Justuce Centre. Suddenly, we realised we had the venue for “AVVS: The Trial”. Whilst the site of the Temperance Hall had long been tarmaced over, there was a modern equivalent in Canal Street itself. The largest and most famous venue in the Gay Village, Via, welcomed us in to stage “AVVS: The Raid”. And the problem of the bridging historical record and historical speculation was solved with the invention of Henry Newman. The Manchester Central Library was another venue for the festival and it’s performance space has large arched windows that look out over the red stone facade of the Midland Hotel, which is mentioned by Detective Camiada in his memoirs. We had found the perfect venue for “AVVS: The Press”, one again right under our noses.
Subsequent blogs on each of the separate elements of “A Very Victorian Scandal” will give more fascinating insights into the writing and production process.
Photo credits: Nicolas Chinardet (except poster Daniel Mee)
Festival Theatre 2014: The Beginnings
In February 2014, I produced a night of political protest plays in Manchester called “To Russia With Love: Stage”. To mark the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Manchester’s LGBT+ theatre community presented 24 hours of protest and performance to draw attention to homophobia in the host country. The aim was to send a message of love and support to the LGBT community in Russia. The event featured “To Russia With Love: Street” an alternative opening ceremony in Manchester’s gay village and “To Russia With Love: Stage” (TRWL) a performance of new writing as part of a local queer arts festival.
I was then the Artistic Director of VADA LGBTQ Community Theatre and just beginning to take my writing for stage more seriously, having won a place on a new MA course in Playwrighting at the University of Salford, starting that September. I’d also meet Jeff Evans from LGBT History Month after he’d given one of his talks on the criminalisation of homosexualty. We’d started to talk about the possibilities for dramatising some cases he’d been researching for his PhD, along with Ric Brady, another member of VADA.
For TRWL, I’d been successful at securing an Arts Council of England grant, a vital ingredient for any possible future drama that LGBT HM might produce, and I’d written one of the pieces for the night, a thirty minute play called “One Abstention” directed by David Mansell, who was then a Script Editor on Coronation Street.
With Jeff coming to see the plays, a lot rested on whether he thought the night in general, and my piece specifically, was any good. Thankfully, not only did we sell out, which pleased Jeff enormously, but he was also suitably impressed with the artistic quality of the work, and some more serious and detailed discussions began.
Jeff felt that the case of 47 men who were arrested in a police raid on a drag ball Hulme (a district of central Manchester) in September 1880 looked liked promising material.
He had all the original press reports of the case, which had been a national sensation at the time, as well as detailed census data on all the 47 men arrested, showing their ages, occupations and living arrangements in the years before and after their arrests. The raid had been led by Detective Jermome Caminada, himself a fascinating Victorian detective (and arguably a model for Sherlock Holmes). The case occured at the same time as the Acting Chief Constable of Manchester, Charles Wood, received his promotion. Was that really a concidence? There seemed like a wealth of material and a number of potentially strong directions to take the work in dramatically.
After some debate, three separate strands emerged from the research phase to go into development, which would form a three part play. Below are the intial plans that Ric Brady and I worked up with their original working titles. This has never been publised anywhere before:
- Part 1: The Drag Ball Raid: a theatrical happening at an LGBT Manchester venue on Canal Street. We will recreate the Police raid complete with Victorian Drag Queens being arrested by Victorian Policemen. The incongruity between a modern venue and period characters is a deliberate device to stimulate interest in a ‘never seen before’ event. All the images taken will be deliberately mirror some of the Victorian illustrations of the ball and will be used as part of the social media campaign
- Part 2: Detective Caminada: a theatrical vignette at Manchester Central Library and Manchester Detective Office, focusing on the institutional politics between Detective Caminada (the lead detective of the raid) and Charles Malcolm Wood (Manchester’s Chief Constable) and the emerging relationship between the press and the Police, as they struggle with each other over how crime and the city are portrayed.
- Part 3: The Cells & The Court: an immersive theatre piece at the Greater Manchester Police Museum (formerly the Newton Street Police Station), where audience members are treated as though they are the arrested ball attendees. They will be led through the charging procedure, placed in a cell with one of the defendants (an actor in character) and be part of a scene in the on-site Victorian Court (formerly Denton Police Court), in which the drag queens are in the dock. We hope to have key LGBT historians and academics playing extras in this court scene.
We certainly had a great deal of ambition, but as plans progressed, it became clear that several of the above ideas either wouldn’t work in practice or would be prohibitively expensive to realise. Some rethinking was done, but what emerged in 2015, I would argue, enabled a wider audience to be reached and had a different but equally strong set of historical resonances.