Come To Where I’m From is the first of the shows the theatre company Paines Plough are presenting at Live Theatre. Paines have asked writers to return to their hometowns and write about ‘the places that shaped them’. Each performance sees four writers reading the results.
Opening was the sparkly Tracey Whitwell, a London-living Geordie at heart. A trained actress who hated posh drama students, she found a break in a Catherine Cookson mini-series, which brought her back home to Newcastle. Her humorous, warm anecdotes made it feel as if we were friends: “Cookson was like Wuthering Heights with stottie cakes”.
The shyer Dick Curran narrated the history of Jarrow (home of the Venerable Bede) from its foundation as a seat of learning in Europe, a time when “the Pope knew where Jarrow was”, although as Curran drily quipped “doubt he does now”. Curran’s softly spoken voice belied a passion about Jarrow that was both interesting and moving. Alison Carr was the highlight. Carr utilised her surrealist humour to discuss the “inertia of the house share” – where she kept banging her head on slanted beams, as she had not realised she had moved into an ‘Oompa Lumpa half-way house’.
Michael Chaplin sketched the urban landscape of the city, and its relationship to the River Tyne, “as vast as the Mississippi…that stank to high heaven”.
Come to Where I’m From is on tour until November. For details see www.painesplough.com
Review by
Clara Walden