There’s a riot at the heart of this play
IN October 2005, simmering tensions in the Lozells area of Birmingham suddenly flared into riots when rumours about the gang rape of a young Jamaican girl by a group of Asian men were fanned by a local pirate radio station.
Although the story itself proved to be untrue, the violence it provoked led to two deaths, extensive damage to property and community relations, and a further blow to the image of an area already associated with gun crime and riots in the 1980s.
Now Birmingham Rep has commissioned a new play inspired by the events in Lozells – although the play itself, These Four Streets, is a work of fiction and does not name the inner-city area in which it is set.
It has been written by a team of six young women playwrights from a variety of backgrounds – Naylah Ahmed, Sonali Bhattacharyya, Jennifer Farmer, Lorna French, Amber Lone and Cheryl Akila Payne. Several are from Birmingham and have graduated through the Rep’s schemes for young writers or have other previous connections to the theatre.
“In my early writing years I was on the Rep’s very good writing scheme, so I have a relationship with them as a writer,” says Naylah Ahmed, who is the founding script editor of Silver Street on the BBC Asian Network and has written and produced plays for radio.
Naylah, who grew up in Small Heath, recently won the Bruntwood Playwriting Prize at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, for her play Butcher Boys.
Although the writers began by researching what had happened in Lozells, Naylah stresses that this is not a literal account of what happened there in 2005.
“It isn’t a journalistic or verbatim piece. It takes inspiration from what we learned from our research and how we found we could depict a community. The concept of rumour is an interesting thing to look at, particularly in a group of writers – how the rumour is taken up by different people and how it can grow.”
Naylah says that the six writers evolved the play through workshops and “a strange process of to-ing and fro-ing”.
She adds: “We each have a couple of scenes in there and it took a lot of honesty and gelling as a group – I don’t mean hugs and kisses – to be able to be honest with each other and then go for lunch together.
“The real challenge is it’s a play that has to have a beginning and an end within an hour and 10 minutes.”
The play is this year’s Rep community tour, and the fact that it will be playing to young audiences gave the writers a responsibility to try to present a bigger picture to teenagers who might normally only relate to their own direct experiences.
“When you go to Lozells you realise pretty soon that people are just living there like we live wherever we live,” says Naylah. “There’s so much that weighing down a place like Lozells but just because something big happened there doesn’t mean it can’t recover.
“All places have challenges and Lozells is no exception, but it’s not this place some people think it is where you can’t walk down a street without a gun in your pocket.
“The strongest hope I have is that the play retains a sense of hope and a sense of humour – the stuff in life that keeps you going. But it’s only when I sit and watch it with an audience in front of it that I will know whether it’s succeeded.”
* These Four streets is at The Door, Birmingham Rep, from February 12-28.
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