This morning I spoke to Philip Ralph. It was a few moments after he and the cast of Deep Cut had been presented with a Fringe First following the first week of Deep Cut’s run at The Traverse in Edinburgh. Tomorrow the company will go on to receive a Herald Angel courtesy of The Glasgow Herald. I could not be happier for Phil, but he was quick to tell me that he felt a bit peculiar about receiving the award when, as he put it, “it’s not about us.”
Self-evidently, of course, a verbatim play based on the tragic injustices of Deep Cut has at its heart a delicate and troubling relationship to the real-life circumstances of the families, whose incredible dignity in the most unthinkable of circumstances is remarkable. Deep Cut focusses on the story of Cheryl James and her parents Des and Doreen. Time and again, Doreen James has talked about how private she is and, in an interview in The Guardian today, about how she would have been utterly horrified, if you had suggested some years ago that she would become a character in a play.
Rhian Morgan and Ciaran McIntyre as Des and Doreen James in Deep Cut
Imagine the circumstances last Wednesday night then, when the Collinson family (parents of James Collinson who was also killed at Deep Cut) joined Des and Doreen for a performance at The Traverse. The cast had already come face to face with their real-life counter-parts at a dress-rehearsal in Cardiff. Presumably Michael Billington would have been appalled, because the five strong audience rose to their feet as one to give their verbatim selves a standing ovation. In Edinburgh, however, Mick Gordon, the play’s director, asked Des James whether he would be willing to speak the final words – his own words – at the end of the play. Des said that he would be honoured.
That night, Des and Doreen sat in the front row and, as it came to the end before a packed house, Ciaran McIntyre and Rhian Morgan – the actors playing Des and Doreen – stayed in the wings. With astonishing dignity and control, Des with Doreen, as always, at his side, walked forward to the centre of the stage and spoke again the following words:
DES: We have some rules of engagement. Don’t embellish. Don’t exagerrate. Don’t get hysterical. Tell the truth. Stick to it. That’s when they can’t handle you. They can’t manipulate you when they do that. (BEAT) I can’t believe in the basic facts. That four families can lose four kids, four families can unanimously, continually and consistently ask for a public inquiry and the Government will do anything at all – apart from that. Now, if somebody can sit me down and explain that, fine. But I can’t understand it. And it could have been done, it could have been done by now, a long time ago, you know? So, of course, that leads you to question: ‘Why not? What’s being hidden?’ You know, there’s no fairness out there and if people think there is, well, you know, I just hope nothing happens to them. There’s no divine right for justice in this country, unfortunately and I mean that. I’m not just being melodramatic. I really mean that. And that, for me has been a big surprise, you know, I really did think in the beginning, I thought a public inquiry was a formality. How wrong can you be? (BEAT) I never think of myself as a campaigner [but] it was a stark realization for me many months ago that this started out as righting a wrong for Cheryl but now it’s more than that. Now, it is very much about righting a wrong, full stop. The biggest part of me accepts that I’ll never really know what happened to [Cheryl]. I try not to put myself in a corner where I defend whether it was [suicide] or whether it wasn’t cause I do believe that it’s irrelevant. I really don’t care. To me, either way, it doesn’t matter. She’s gone. (BEAT) I’m not looking for people to be on my side cause they think I’ve been treated badly. I want them to be on my side because they believe me and because they believe, as passionately as I do, that we cannot treat each other this way. (BEAT) It stops when it’s over.
In truth, asking this of the family was a huge risk which could have backfired horribly for all sorts of reasons. But that doesn’t take into account the resilience, bravery and character of Des James, who, as Phil described it, gave a masterclass in oratory that any actor would have been humbled by. The audience, who only gradually could have been aware that this was the real person before them, were predictably overwhelmed. Afterwards, Des and Doreen must have again been affected by the strangeness of seeing an horrific moment in their lives played out. However, an astonishing number of the audience – three quarters – went up to them afterwards to kiss, hug them and to tell them to keep going in their fight for justice.
Rhian Blythe as Jonsey in Deep Cut
Deep Cut was a very important project for Sgript Cymru and I feel very proud that we commissioned it. Nearly every member of the company at one stage or another accompanied Philip on the various trips he made to interview those affected. Very quickly, we were all engaged by a sense of the deep-seated injustice of what happened, but also by the incredible humanity of Des and Doreen James. Indeed, Phil told me early on that working on the play had changed his life and it was clear to everyone, not least the James family, the extraordinary sense of mission he was bringing to the project. In some ways, to be given an award for a play about somebody else’s tragedy could feel weirdly fraudulent and vicarious, but I can’t think of anyone else who could have brought such integrity, honesty and commitment to this enormous task.
No Comments Yet
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
