In the dead of night, books are slipped from shelves. Scores are stolen and paintings removed. Any artist who creates “beyond the accepted limit” is punished: painters blinded, musicians deafened, each one robbed of the sense they rely on most for their work. This is the world, tucked into the Sussex coast, that Kay Dick imagines in They. First published in 1977 it was, until very recently, largely ignored. Newly republished, and soon to be staged, this rural English dystopia outlines the bone-deep urge to create.
“It takes a lot to dull that impulse,” says Sarah Frankcom, former director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda). In a rehearsal room in central London, empty but for a paper-strewn table, the director sits with actor Maxine Peake and movement director Imogen Knight. Together they are transforming Dick’s nightmarish tale into a live show. It is to be the inaugural performance of their new company, Maat (Music, Art, Activism and Theatre), one that holds art and activism at its heart.
Frankcom was the first to pick the book up and pass it on to the others: “It asks what’s art for and who is it for? We were in conversation about what our creative practice is, and sometimes how hard you have to work to keep taking risks. I found the book inspiring because of how it celebrates the act of creation.” In the text, she sees not only a study of fear, but one of resistance and togetherness. “Her belief in friendship and communities of artists seems central,” Frankcom says of the author; Dick’s characters stick together even as everything around them disappears.
“It feels visionary,” says Peake, who – 25 years since she first made her name in Victoria Wood’s Dinnerladies – is now a firm favourite on stage. “When you look in the north, what’s been happening with cultural institutions being closed, it does feel like we’re creeping towards something like it.”
Knight nods. “All over the world, you feel like somebody’s just turning the lights out,” says the movement director and intimacy coordinator, whose work on HBO’s Chernobyl shares with They a physical exploration of collective fear.
The book itself almost didn’t survive. Coolly received and left to go out of print, it was only saved when a publishing agent picked up an old copy in a charity shop and saw the genius in Dick’s story. It’s a slip of a book, just over 100 pages, but it is striking that it drew so little attention the first time around. “Artists do not have to be blinded or burned to be silenced,” Carmen Maria Machado writes in the book’s new introduction, “their suppression can be as simple as creating or maintaining economic precariousness and allowing books to fade away.”
At this year’s Manchester international festival, the book will be taking centre stage. It tells of a world that could be our own near future. Anonymous mobs haunt the landscape, referred to only as “they”. They are an ungoverned and quickly growing mass who discourage speech and communication, repress artistic endeavours and see solitary living as a threat. They burn homes and studios and crush the petals of proudly grown flowers. Destruction encroaches on every page; the narrator sees people taken to The Centre to be “cured”. They come back blank and absent, their memories, emotions and any activist inclinations scrubbed clean. To keep the stories alive, the narrator’s friends train a teenager to remember, feeding him stories and songs in the hope he won’t be a target. “Is Jake’s memory good enough?” the narrator asks fearfully, before passing on a poem for him to learn.
Asked to consider the stories she would try to hold on to, Peake doesn’t hesitate. She picks Percy Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy – “My pension piece,” she laughs. Knight and Frankcom agree to share the collected works of Mary Oliver. The trio have worked together for more than a decade, starting with the production of Shelley’s poem, which recalled the ghosts of the Peterloo massacre, a rallying cry for nonviolent resistance. Their previous collaborations, Peake believes, have helped create an audience ready to trust in what they make. In 2019, they shaped The Nico Project together, a piece about the Velvet Underground singer whose 1968 solo album The Marble Index was all but ignored at the time.
“When we did Nico, people expected a biopic,” Peake laughs. Instead, they presented an intense and swirling experimental show at the Stoller Hall. “We’re lucky,” she says. “Maybe because we have a strong connection to Manchester, people get behind us.” They hope that will be the case again now.
We speak only a month before their first sold-out performance of They. And yet, it’s quickly revealed, the three makers have only the very faintest idea of what they’re going to be presenting. “As we say that,” Peake says mischievously, “I’m grinning.”
Professional productions tend to be made in a heavily structured four- or five-week rehearsal period, with a strict timeline, a dedicated tech week, and very clear jobs for each person involved. But going into making They, Peake, Frankcom and Knight want to chuck away this structure entirely. “We don’t want to get into a formulaic practice,” says Knight.
“We like the unknown.” Frankcom agrees. “As I’ve got older,” she says, “I find being creative in that structure harder, because it mitigates taking maximum risk.”
Instead, they are making this show quickly and intensely, going in with little preparation and no defined roles. There is a buzzing sense between them that they are itching to try something new, to have the space to just make. “People used to tell us what we should be doing,” Frankcom says. “It’s taken quite a while to be in a place where we can do what we want to do.”
The ability to create in this way with the backing of a big festival is not something they take for granted. “There’s something that happens in theatre with female makers,” Frankcom says. “When you’ve been doing it for a bit … ” she falters, “I don’t know where they go.” By forming their new company, the trio are ensuring a sense of certainty, a carved-out space to keep learning and stretching and taking risks with their work.
“People think success comes from earning lots of money from doing big TV series or whatever,” Peake says, “They say: ‘You don’t need to do this.’” She sweeps her hand, as if leftfield live performance sits atop the table. “But I do need to do this,” she insists. “The older I get, the more I feel I really have to do work that’s fulfilling and stimulating and political. I don’t want to be one of those actors sitting in a green room of a big show, moaning: ‘I’m only doing this because I need new decking.’”
With literature and learning at its heart, the performance of They will take place in the neo-gothic John Rylands library, part of the University of Manchester, an extraordinary building gifted to the people of the city. “The book very delicately describes the asset-stripping of culture,” Frankcom says. “It feels right to do this in a place which is a sort of church of art and a church of learning.”
Taking the rough shape of a book reading – although the rehearsal room could change even that spark of a plan – it’s not strictly the story they want to adapt but the feeling of the book’s delicious subtitle: “a sequence of unease”. “I feel like all our work could fit under that heading,” Knight says with a smile. It is clear the three love working together. “The beauty of it,” she says of their relationship, “is that as a three, we are getting braver as we get older.”
In making work outside traditional theatrical settings, they have found that their audiences often have no previous experience of the spaces: people will have walked past the sites every day on their way to work but never been inside. “It’s an inclusive library but it’s very imposing,” Peake says of the John Rylands building, “and we know architecture can be a barrier.” By offering a chance to see the building out of hours and to turn it into the host for an unusual theatrical event, they hope to offer audiences a chance to see the space anew, to see themselves as a part of it.
“There’s something quite pleasing about finding a place that maybe you didn’t know was there,” says Frankcom, “while also experiencing a book that only had a very limited print run when it was first published, that has sort of been found.” Both, they hope, are opportunities for rediscovery.
