Lee Mattinson on writing Steel

Writer, Lee Mattinson

Lee Mattinson’s play, Steel, about Workington, an ex-steel making town in West Cumbria, is premiering at Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake before going on tour around Cumbria.

A town-wide treasure hunt for a million quid of lost railway and the wild hearts of two teenage boys, is the basis for this production that looks to challenge as much as it entertains. Lee grew up in Workington and drew on his memories there to create the story which was commissioned by Theatre by the Lake. I grabbed Lee for a few minutes to talk about the play and find out about the playwright himself.

This was an unusual interview for me as I’ve spent most of the last twenty-four years living in Whitehaven, historically the great rival with Workington. BBC’s Mark Steel, when he did a show on Whitehaven, made the point that we have the silliest of all insults, which is thrown in both directions. I started by teasing Lee, suggesting we’re meant to be sworn enemies as he’s a ‘jam eater’.

Lee: I think you’ll find you’re the jam eater, Ken! It’s so weird, I’m triggered by ‘jam eater’, I think it’s in my blood! I’ve explained to some of my friends about that kind of rivalry. Now and again they’ll drop it into conversations, and it really winds me up. I’m not an angry person, nothing gets my back up – except jam eater!

But I’m very fond of Whitehaven, I went to sixth form there. I’ve got some really gorgeous memories of a café called Cross’s in the town centre. I went there again recently and it hasn’t changed at all.

We reminisced a while about growing up in 80s working towns, fights and all.

It sounds like your play, Steel, is similar, looking at the past, good and bad, about living in a town like Workington. It sounds a bit like Slumdog Millionaire does Cumbria. What’s it really like? What are you getting across?

The starting point for me was what would a young person from Cumbria who had no agency do if suddenly they had some agency. I remember feeling like that as a seventeen-year-old in the dark corners of West Cumbria wondering where I was headed, feeling like I had little say in that, but being aware that the environment I was growing up in had a massive hang-over from the steelworks era. It was quite a dispossessed environment.

The idea was to take a scrappy seventeen-year-old from Workington and give him sudden and overnight agency to make big decisions. I was really intrigued by what he would do with that. It’s a story that reaches into the history of Workington through the steelworks, looks at what we’re teaching young men about how to be, the effects of the de-industrialisation of that area and how that rippled and ricocheted into the community.

These kinds of towns have been forgotten. We only look as far as the lakes; past that it’s just a bit of a no man’s land. It’s a really interesting area because of things like ‘Jam eater’ and because it marches to its own weird, brilliant, beautiful, chaotic beat. It’s bursting with stories and no one’s telling them. I’m from Workington and moved away a long time ago, but I was really interested in going back to that environment, in my own imagination, and trawling it for ideas, trying to capture the beauty of those towns and putting them on a stage because they’re so theatrical.

That feels like you, you’re almost your main character, James. He is almost mirroring you in in doing that and in looking back in it in his past. Is there some affinity between you and this character?

It’s absolutely not my story but, obviously, I know what it’s like to be seventeen in that town, so I’ve leaned into it as much as that. There’ll be bits that I don’t realise are mine and my family’s and my friends’ lives until I see it on stage. Because there’s so much happening in it, I can’t quite remember where stuff came from, but going back to that space in my own history has been really cathartic. I bolted to Newcastle when I was twenty, did a fine art degree and then just didn’t go back so much. So, to go back and look at it with a safe writer’s gaze and pick through those memories, really interrogate where we are now. We ran a lot of workshops with schools, to speak to those young people now and ask what is it like to grow up as a young person in West Cumbria now?

What did you conclude or what do you get from that? Where are we with young people, in your assessment?

L: A big bit of the play is looking at identity and how difficult it is to be different to that kind of norm in West Cumbria and one of the questions we asked all the young people in all the schools was, how easy is it to identify as anything other than straight and normal? The feedback was that it isn’t easy. The climate now isn’t that different to the climate back then. I wanted to be proven wrong. I wanted the response to be, “Actually, your play about it being tricky to identify in certain ways isn’t relevant anymore. Everything’s great here. We’re all fine.” Things haven’t progressed that much; it was quite sad to know that that climate can still be quite suffocating for some young people.

I’ve got noted that in the play there’s going to be ‘laugh out loud’ moments and things like that. Is it a play of hope or does it reflect something of what you’re saying – that actually things haven’t changed and life can be pretty grim?

It is really hopeful. I was determined to find that hope and optimism in conversations that could be quite dark and paint quite a grim landscape. There has to be hope in there. There has to be optimism – where is that and how is that? If it isn’t massively flourishing at the minute, how do we use the play and use the conversation around it to begin to embed some of that?

Hopefully it’s funny. It’s as ridiculous and wild as Workington is; as broken and tragic as Workington is, but ultimately it goes – what next? What next for a town that that might have got stuck or lost its sense of community? What next for us so that things can begin to change and we can begin to have conversations that are more progressive? It’s got a really celebratory end. We’ve got a choir at the end. You can’t have a happier end than a choir! It’s the best sticking plaster.

How have you found it working with Theatre by the Lake with all this? I know you’re going to be on rural tour after the initial run at Theatre by the Lake. But how have you found it working with the theatre?

It’s been great. I’m the associate artist there. As well as doing the play, I was also helping them with their new writing strategy, how they work with local artists and how they develop and evolve that programme under Liz, who’s been there a few years now.

I’m from Workington, but I’d never been to Theatre by the Lake. I think I’d been to Keswick once. It was like Workington and Keswick are worlds apart and with growing up in Workington, I went to Keswick once and didn’t really understand it. It’s like the Lake District was the next-door neighbour – like the TV comedy, The Good Life. The Lake District was the ‘Margo and Jerry’ next door. It felt like a completely different world.

So it’s been nice to explore Keswick and be in the lakes. Theatre by the Lake have been great. They’ve been really supportive. I think the commissioning of local writers and local stories is really good. They’re looking to do more of that and they should be doing more of that. Cumbria is the third largest county and it’s bursting with ideas and stories. I went to the theatre’s Open Stages event last year and they’re engaging better with local artists and bringing out those gorgeous, beautiful stories which they’re pulling together for CumbriaFest. So yeah, it’s been really nice.

You said that you left Cumbria fairly early on and headed over to Newcastle to do Fine Arts. How did you progress from that into writing plays?

Basically, I finished my degree and wasn’t really sure what I was going to do next. I got a job in live theatre in Newcastle. I was doing at bar job at the theatre and I started to see the work there. It was 2003-2004 and they were making loads of new brilliant working-class productions. Every night there was a new play – ink still wet on the page kind of thing. And I had not experienced theatre; I’d never been to one. I started experiencing all these stories in this form that I’d never witnessed before. I was only twenty-three and I was like, “I want do that!”. You think you can do anything at twenty-three, and I was like, “Well, I could maybe try and do that at least”.

So, I wrote a play and it won the BBC Prize and I’ve not really stopped since then. I was in the right place, in the right job, at the right time, in the right theatre to see a play that was just a voice I recognised. It was a working-class voice talking about a community that I understood and I didn’t know that that’s what theatre was, because I’d not been exposed to it before. I knew what Shakespeare was, but I didn’t know what brilliant northeast writing was like, about communities that had nothing. I was like, “I understand that because I’m from Workington so I could maybe do that too”. I tried and it worked.

Have you stuck with theatre or do you do radio plays and other kinds of writing, TV and so on?

L: Yes, it’s mostly been theatre. I’ve done a few radio plays for BBC Radio. I worked at Corrie for a while. I was a storyliner there for about six months which was really exciting. I’m doing a lot more screen now. I’ve got a short film called Fist that I did about two years ago. That’s just screened in New York. We got an RTS award last year for that, so that’s doing really well. Then I’m working on a feature with the same company and we’re just getting funding for that now, which is kind of based back in Workington as well.

You’ve been doing some work with young people in in this area. Who are you doing that with and what’s the ethos or the thinking behind that? Is it a research group or is it actually a group that’s trying to make an impact? And secondly, why back here? What’s brought you back to Workington?

We set up some workshops through Theatre by the Lake just to test the ideas of the play against those young people as audience members. Aside from being a writer, I also run a company called North Star Co Design, which is about activating cultural experiences in under-served communities and making big, bold, ambitious work with those people. We’re currently running a project in Workington funded through the arts council.

I think the pull back to Workington was a kind of untapped draw inside my head of experiences. I lived there for twenty years. I lived there through a lot of formative years. I had a lot of brilliant and bad experiences there. I was like, “What would it be to unpack this and think about that through a different lens?”. I felt like I’m always ‘magpie-ing’ stories from everywhere and from my own life. I felt like there was an untapped seam there that I could explore.

I’d had the idea for Steel for many years, and it was just an idea that was sitting in my head. Then I met Liz is at the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting in Manchester. I got shortlisted for that. Liz had just taken over and she was interested in finding new stories. And I was like, “Well, I’ve got this idea about the steelworks that isn’t anywhere near written down. It’s only two sentences in my head, but we could have a conversation about it and that might be exciting to begin to think about what Workington on stage looks like”. Fast forward to now and here it is!

In the play, the characters are delving back into the past. I presume the two actors are playing a range of roles – as it’s a two-hander – and they’ll take on the various different characters.

Yes. One of the actors just plays James and then the other actor plays Kamran, his best mate, and everybody else. So, one of the actors plays about eleven or twelve parts. It’s a tricky gig! But James just gets to play James. Kamran kind of orbits him with all these wild characters that they bump into. He has to do a bit of shape-shifting on the evening.

That sounds great fun! You’ve got Cameron played by Suraj Shah.  Did you write for the actors for the roles or is this deliberate? Have we got a character here who is of Asian background of some sort?

Yeah, Kamran is a south-Asian character. I didn’t write for those actors, but I did write a white character and south-Asian character. Obviously, I don’t have the lived experience of that. I did a series of workshops with Anti Racist Cumbria. I got in touch with them and I said, “I’m writing this character. I don’t have the lived experience of someone with a diverse ethnic background. Can I work with some of your young people to explore some of the experiences that I’m examining within the play, so I can make his life as authentic as possible?”

I was intrigued by Kamran because Workington’s a really white town. When I was growing up there in the 80s, it was very, very white. The play is about a gay character and I was interested in writing about that, but I was also thinking, “Well, if I’m going write about gay characters and people’s different experiences of this, then it would be interesting to write about the experience of someone who wasn’t white in that town as well.” I didn’t want to lead with that because that’s not my experience, but I did want to touch on the complexities of the intersectionality.

I spoke to a lot of brilliant young people at Anti Racist Cumbria and went through the ideas of the play, the journey of Kamran and this relationship with James and asked, “Is this right? Is this good?” They gave me loads of brilliant stuff that made it into the play. I tested it bit by bit against them. Is this right or wrong? What is this feeling like? And so on. It was a hard part of the process, but it was better than not telling the story at all. No one else was telling this story, so I decided I would take it on and I will try to do the work as thoroughly as I can to tell this story as authentically as I can.

We talked for a while about a changes in attitude. I have a gay friend who had his 50^th in an historically impoverished part of Whitehaven, a place that would not have been tolerant 50 years ago. His party was overtly gay and rampantly, joyously camp and everyone loved it. Is that indicative of how things have changed, I wondered.

Do you feel there’s any kind of change for the better? You said earlier that the kids say there’s still a definite need to fit in. Is there any signs of that changing?

I think there absolutely is. There’s a brilliant organisation called Queer Cumbria who I’m working with through North Star Co-Design, which is run by an incredible artist called Stevie Westgarth. He’s based in Carlisle, but he’s doing a lot of work all over Cumbria. He’s phenomenal and he’s spearheading a lot of that work. North Star is part of a network with Queer Cumbria and a lot of other organisations across the county that are working with young individuals who identify as LGBTQ. There’s a lot of them and there’s a lot of people doing really, really brilliant work but it’s a slow process, isn’t it?

I think the shifts are definitely happening, and they’re really positive. We went to Whitehaven Pride about a month ago and it was absolutely beautifully chaotic. It was so busy and so bustling, and we met so many incredible young people in the youth tent. Everyone was out and proud and taking up this space that they should be taking up. So that in and of itself is a massive, massive shift. The mayor of Workington, Neil, who runs the Carnegie, is trying to organise Workington pride for next year, which I have no doubt he’ll do because he’s got the support of lots of brilliant people who are really helping that cause.

So, things have changed and are changing and hopefully we will still be part of that evolution and part of that conversation: where do we go? What next and what now? And how are we supporting lads like James and Kamran?

Do you think it was inevitable to come back home sooner or later?

I would never have thought it until a few years ago. I left and didn’t look back and then then I started looking over my shoulder a little bit, I was like, “Oh, I’m really curious about that. I’m curious about those experiences in that time. I’m curious to look at it and lay it all out as an adult now”. I am someone whose job it is to be curious and to unpack these things and go: What does this mean now? And can it mean something different and is there healing and catharsis there?

And there was! That was a massive surprise. A real, beautiful, beautiful surprise. It feels insane to be going to the Carnegie soon with a gay play about Workington, but it also feels exceptional. It’s really good. It’s really gorgeous.

Steel plays Theatre by the Lake until Sat 19 October and then goes on tour until 3 November. More info here.

Ken Powell is chief editor for Northern Arts Review and is also a bestselling author and writer for various publications around the world. A former school teacher, he continues to write educational books along with fiction and travelogues. You can find all his books and various websites here including his popular TEDx talk about the Global Village. He lives with his family in a wonderfully isolated village in West Cumbria where he enjoys drinking tea, chatting with the birds and winding up his dog. You can support his work (or just buy him a coffee) here.