Hiking leftwards
Behold Ye Ramblers at the Old Fire Station, Oxford On Saturday, May 4 By JON LEWIS
TOWNSEND Productions tours small-scale productions nationwide with stories of people improving the working conditions and lives of ordinary people.
Writer and actor Neil Gore’s latest play Behold Ye Ramblers, directed by Louise Townsend, tells the stories of two late Victorian and early Edwardian campaigners for socialism.
A solo show, Gore structures the narrative as a music hall event with much of the story told in songs either written and composed by Gore or by period songsmiths.
The first of the characters is the founder of the socialist newspaper The Clarion, Robert Blatchford, who wrote under the pen name Nunquam. As Gore takes on the characters, there are projections of The Clarion as well as playbills, posters and photographs.
Gore breaks the fourth wall
continually to encourage us to respond to cue cards as if we are the original theatregoers in the music hall, and then, as in a folk concert, he teaches everyone to sing along with the choruses of the songs.
The most poignant scene in the first half takes place in St Helens, which Blatchford calls “an ugly, horrible town” of stench-making factories manufacturing glass and chemicals. He visits one such chemical factory where workers work only if they are fit and aged under 40.
They wear cloth masks (Gore puts one on in a demonstration) to provide some, if minimal, protection against the choking effect of the chlorine gas. Blatchford describes the disastrous effect on the workers who are paid a pittance, and their families, but discovers it is too unsafe to enter the workplace floor itself.
After the interval the focus changes to Sheffield conductor and Clarion activist GHB Ward who encouraged his choirs to compete in competitions.
Gore creates a community choir out of the packed Old Fire Station audience, singing along to O! We’ll Turn Things Upside Down, a political ditty by John Bruce Glasier.
Ward exhorts choir members to join his ramblers society, The Sheffield Clarion Ramblers, leading them from Sheffield Midland Railway Station to Hope in the Peak District where their hikes around Edale foreshadows the larger mass trespasses in the same place 30 years later.
An educative and entertaining production.