Two men circle each other in a salt-strewn arena. The younger one coolly recites a manual for how to rob your family to finance a drug habit: “1. Get investors: Dad … 2. Get more investors: Mum – bless her … ” The older one, thumping his chest with shame, struggles through his “three reasons not to kill myself today”.
Oscar and Ryan are telling their own stories. Both know, through bitter experience, the price of addiction. But on this makeshift stage, on the shop floor of an abandoned department store in a town centre shopping mall, they are harnessing the full power of theatre to communicate that experience to others who may, or may not, be more fortunate than them.
They are among nine performers in Secret Voices, a new theatre piece commissioned for a fringe festival based in a suburb of Bournemouth. If you think the Dorset resort is all about tourists and celebrity seaside pads, think again. Boscombe, a couple of miles east of the city centre, could claim to be the UK’s recovery capital, turning out a growing population of recovering addicts who decide to stay because they’ve left wrecked lives back home, and this is where their friends have settled.
Oscar, a 22-year-old model whose previous roles include fronting a Gilbert & George campaign for the fashion label JW Anderson, spent his childhood between Hampshire and south London. Ryan, 45, was abused during his Catholic childhood in the Midlands, arriving in Boscombe at the start of the millennium via several spells in prison, and now has a day job with the Addaction charity for juvenile addiction.
Alongside them in Secret Voices is Shelley, a 32-year-old from Luton who arrives bleary from a night shift in a homeless hostel. She has always written poetry, but has never performed before. Her heart-rending monologue takes the form of a plea to her 18-year-old self not to step inside that brothel. “I’m this little girl in this little outfit, and none of my family know yet …”
Holding it all together – sometimes literally – is the writer and director Nell Leyshon, the only member of the company who lives in the area for reasons unconnected with rehab. When I arrive she is discussing with set-builder/performer Gary how to make his scaffolding-plank seating splinter-proof. By the time I leave, she is struggling with a ruling from the (otherwise supportive) shopping-centre manager that she cannot under any circumstances spray black paint on the scuzzy red carpet surrounding the stage. “Hell!” chirps up performer Jane. “We’ll find a solution for sure.”
Leyshon is a playwright and novelist who made her directing debut last year with The Vodka Hunters, which used four of the same performers and was such a success that it inspired her to set up a company, the Outsiders Project. Jane, a 52-year-old cascade of multicoloured dreadlocks towing a support dog named Lucky, was one of the stars of that first show, which told of broken relationships between parents and children. “I have one daughter, who’s now 26, but I’ve only seen her once since she was 12,” she says cheerfully. “Mad as a bunch of frogs, me.”
Leyshon is now pushing Jane on the next stage of her journey, which is to write about becoming a writer, a subject Jane finds far harder than confronting her own past. “I don’t feel as confident not telling shocking stories,” she jokes. It later becomes clear this is another way of saying she prefers to write about demons with which she has made her peace. She delivered her share of the script on reams of paper that Leyshon then helped her to craft, and which they continue to restructure in response to little daily challenges, such as a no-show by someone with whom Jane was due to share a scene. “She’s so talented. I wasn’t sure she’d be well enough to do this but she always gets there,” says the director, outside Jane’s hearing.
“My job,” Leyshon explains, “is to shape, not to write. We do some improvisation, and sometimes someone dictates and I write. There is a difference between orality and literacy, and a difference between prose writing and dramatic writing, so a huge amount of work goes into getting those voices that are authentically theirs but work for the stage as well. But my bottom line is that I never change a word anyone’s written.”
Though the therapeutic value of the performance is clear to everyone involved, Leyshon is equally clear that she is not their therapist. “The idea is to give voice to the completely voiceless, but to make their work brilliant. It’s raw and incredibly truthful. So often when I go to the theatre I know what to expect, but this lot constantly surprise me.”
Their work raises a wider cultural question. “I’m fascinated that there’s a movement of outsider art for visual artists, but not for writer/performers,” says Leyshon. “I think it’s because, whereas outsider painting can be valued as naive, writing is a vast craft and bad writing is just bad writing.”
One of the Vodka Hunters performers, Scott Lavene, has already moved on to his own solo show, The Truth About Men, a “musical journey”, which is being premiered at the Bournemouth Emerging Arts Fringe festival. A talented, self-taught singer-songwriter, who grew up in Essex as one in “a long line of addicts”, he learned his craft busking around Europe and describes his music as gutter-pop.
Lavene has recently been signed to a record label and will embark on an eight-city UK tour at the end of May to launch his new album, Broke. The eight-minute title track gives a sardonic account of what it is like to be truly down and out, but it also raises the question: when is an outsider no longer an outsider?
