It is the play that inspired an award-winning TV series. David Whetstone talks to Erica Whyman about the return to the stage of Our Friends in the North.
TO most people, Our Friends in the North was a successful television series charting the lives of four friends from the North-East over three decades, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s.
It was an award-winning epic serial broadcast in nine episodes on BBC2 in the early part of 1996. The backdrop was the real-life political situation of the times, taking in the town hall corruption of the 1960s and the miners’ strike of the 1980s.
But it all began as a play written by Jarrow-born Peter Flannery for the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was performed in Stratford, had a few performances at the old Gulbenkian Studio (now part of Northern Stage) in 1982 and then disappeared. It took the BBC many years to commission Our Friends in the North as a drama serial and that process involved a hefty re-write with the addition of scenes and an extension of the original span of the story.
But Erica Whyman, boss of Northern Stage, says the original play hasn’t been performed anywhere since it was staged all those years ago by the RSC.
Until now, that is. Northern Stage is presenting Our Friends in the North as the highlight of its autumn season, directed by Erica and with actors Craig Conway, Joe Renton, Neil Armstrong and Sonia Beinroth cast respectively as Geordie, Nicky, Tosker and Mary.
In the TV series the four friends were played by Daniel Craig (who went on to become James Bond), Christopher Eccleston, Mark Strong and Peterlee-born actress Gina McKee.
In a break from auditioning at Northern Stage, Erica explains how, back in 1981, Peter Flannery was invited to spend some time in Stratford on attachment to the RSC. “He was working with a young director, who has since become very well known, called John Caird. The RSC were clearly expecting him to write quite a small play, perhaps about two blokes in a pub in Newcastle. But he said, ‘No, I want to write a play like that’.
“They were doing a production of Shakespeare’s History Cycle at the time – as they are doing again this year – so he wrote this extraordinary play which dealt with 17 years of history and was evenly balanced between three locations – Newcastle, London and what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
“It was a big success at The Other Place (in Stratford) and The Pit (at the Barbican Arts Centre, London) and it came here for just four nights, with 15 people in the cast. Then it caught the eye of television because it had huge potential.”
Erica says it was about three years ago that Peter Flannery thought the original stage play might be worth revisiting. Apparently he saw parallels in what was happening in the world with the cash for honours scandal and the war in Iraq starting to engulf the Labour Government.
“Peter and I were introduced about a year ago, just as Son of Man (Erica’s production of the Dennis Potter play) was on, and I was starting to think about our second year. I said I’d like to find a major piece of work which would be relevant to Newcastle and also be nationally significant. Peter said, ‘Why don’t you do Our Friends in the North?’ So it sort of fell into my lap.”
Erica remembers watching Our Friends in the North on television when she was in London and being sucked into it. Because she had spent her early years in Yorkshire before the family moved south, she could identify with the North/South aspect of the story. “But there was also something really honest about it. I think it told the truth about life in the North at that time and also about London, which is really my manor.”
Erica believes the series changed what was considered possible in television drama and opened the doors for following series like This Life which she views as a kind of Our Friends in the South, about young people from a more privileged background.
She first encountered the play in 1998 when she was taking part in a 24-hour play reading to raise money for a theatre company. Our Friends in the North was chosen because it would soak up a fair few of those hours.
Erica says the play is huge, “Shakespearean in scale”. It will last three hours and involve 14 actors playing more than 40 roles. “We think it needs a big stage to have a big visual impact and that is what it will have here.”
The Rhodesia section of the original stage play didn’t make the TV series. Erica believes it was cut because, at that time, Nelson Mandela had recently been inaugurated as the first black president of South Africa and Robert Mugabe was not regarded as a bad thing. It wasn’t seen as relevant in the way that it might now seem relevant. Those scenes will remain in the play.
Naturally there has been interest in the casting and Erica says she has auditioned widely and cast a mixture of North-East and London-based actors, some of them keen to return to their home region.
Craig Conway is well known in the North-East. He has been cast two years running in the Theatre Royal panto in Newcastle and also appeared in Peter Flannery’s play The Bodies at Live Theatre. His character, Geordie, heads for London and falls into a seedy world of drugs and gangsters.
Neil Armstrong, known to many as Fraser in Byker Grove, plays the dreamer Tosker who fails in his aim of establishing a successful rock band and marries Mary, played here by Sonia Beinroth, a Newcastle-based actress who appeared in Animal Farm. Joe Renton, who has worked on television, for the RSC and in Billy Elliot, plays the idealist Nicky who gets caught up in local government corruption.
Our Friends in the North opens at Northern Stage on September 29 and runs until October 20. It will then tour to Huddersfield and Sheffield before returning in the spring to the Gala Theatre, Durham, Salford, Guildford and Oxford.
Northern Stage box office: (0191) 230-5151 or book online at www.northernstage.co.uk.