Josie Rourke Why I put a House of Commons hearing on the stage
Josie Rourke explains why she decided to turn a House of Commons hearing into a musical
Over my past five years as artistic director at the Donmar Warehouse, we’ve put on a lot of plays inspired by current affairs. We’ve staged pieces about Occupy London, the formation of the SDP, and the Snowden revelations. In James Graham’s play
Privacy, the audience was invited to leave their smartphones on and discover how they were being tracked.
The Vote, set in a polling station and starring Judi Dench, Timothy West and Catherine Tate, went live from the Donmar on to television on the night of the 2015 general election.
The latest in this line of hyper topical new work is a musical, The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee Takes Oral Evidence on Whitehall’s Relationship with Kids Company. Catchy. It’s Committee for short. We’ve taken the transcript of a select committee hearing from October 2015 and distilled it into a 70-minute show.
A verbatim musical is not a new idea. London Road, Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s play at the National about the Ipswich murders between 2006 and 2008, used the rhythms of real speech to create music. And the
Tribunal Plays, staged by London’s Tricycle theatre, were based on verbatim reconstructions of public inquiries, including the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, the Hutton Inquiry (into the death of David Kelly, the weapons expert) and the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. With Committee, composer Tom Deering has written music using a libretto that myself and Hadley Fraser created from that single, oral evidence session.
The news of Kids Company’s collapse had an immediate resonance for me. The Donmar is a charity. We have to raise more than 50 per cent of our turnover from a combination of corporates, trusts and individuals.
One morning, a journalist friend called to suggest I watch a select committee evidence session on the website parliament.tv. It was “exceptional theatre”, she said. Select committees had been a growing presence in the news – I was intrigued.
I went online. Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of Kids Company, and Alan Yentob, its chairman, were being grilled by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs select committee (PACAC) about the charity’s financial reserves, the cash that was handed out in envelopes once a week as part of its “poverty intervention” scheme, and the £3million that was given to the charity just before it collapsed. From the very beginning, when MP Bernard Jenkin, the committee chairman, said that “the objective of the session was not to conduct a show trial”, I sensed that this story was something that could occupy a theatrical space.
There is a strong tradition of courtroom drama in theatre. That dynamic is particularly charged at the Donmar because the audience is so close to the action. As the session went on, I was drawn into a head-versusheart drama. There was a clash of personalities and style of presentation. Hard data crunched up against open-hearted concern. Here was process against passion, with elements of insult, shame and anger, raised voices and interrupted points. It seemed to speak in a theatrical language. My next thought was whether or not it could speak in a musical one. This notion came from listening to Jenkin close down the verbal arias of Camila and Alan. As they began to speak about “vulnerable children”, it seemed that the committee used the hard facts of the charity’s financial collapse to shut down their empathetic flourishes.
Paul Flynn, another committee member, called Batmanghelidjh’s evidence a “non-stop stream of psychobabble”. In one exchange, she asked Jenkin why he thinks her charity is failing. He bluntly replies: “Because it has gone bust.”
I took the three-and-a-half-hour transcript of the original session and edited it down to 80 minutes. We invited some actors to read it for Tom Deering and Hadley Fraser, who confirmed that, yes, there was music there. Tom was interested in how the clash of speaking and rhetorical styles might translate into a musical language. Hadley felt that he could work with the actual words of everyone in the room to make a libretto.
We began our work shortly after the hearing in October 2015. Given how much has happened since, it feels like another world. There’s a line, based on an interview with a former committee clerk, that singles out PACAC as “not one of the sexy committees”.
This project was commissioned before Brexit, before Theresa May was Prime Minister, before Grenfell. That recent tragedy has thrown much of the debate within the piece into sharp focus. Both Batmanghelidjh and Yentob spoke movingly in the evidence session about poverty and housing. There is a conflict of opinion as to who should be providing the help – government or charities.
Flynn posed a question about the apparent failure of the “Big Society agenda”, which “seems to have gone away now”. The committee was also holding David Cameron to account. Flynn’s line now has a particular resonance. Part of the intention was to ask about accountability of charities, but we also wanted to look at where the responsibility for child poverty sits. Almost the last thing Camila sings is “a vacuum of leadership, yet again, the problems remain unresolved”.
Within the last 10 years, our consumption of information has changed beyond recognition. It’s a culture of refresh and move on. Where is theatre’s place in all this? Part of my answer is that, in a shape-shifting world for news and narrative, we need to find new forms in theatre. And if theatre has a place in the endlessly churning news cycle, it’s to provide us with a deep and communal look at a contemporary event. There are no easy answers in Committee, but what Deering’s exceptional score achieves is to create space for reflection on what happened, and prompt us to consider our collective responsibility.