MakingIt! creative writing workshop.

This time last year, I was one of a small number of women lucky enough to play a part in the MakingIt! creative writing workshop. Loosely addressing the broader project, researching the lives of women in Welsh factories, we wrote and acted in our resultant plays. It was fantastic! It opened my eyes to these remarkable women and to the impact their lives had on ours; and a glimpse into the world of writing, producing and acting.

So, when I had an invitation to attend a sharing - a mid-way production of a play written and produced by the same team - I was delighted and very proud. It was joyous to meet my writing group again and we are very much looking forward to the next stage in our joint creative development with Parama2.

And to the play itself. Well. What a thing.

Some things make you feel like you have seen them before. You haven’t. They just have something about them which you recognise, instinctively. They appeal on some very basic level. They are the stories you have heard all your life but never read.

This is how the play makes me feel. I know these women. They are the women I descend from. They would not know me at all. I would be English to them, posh, privileged; and they’d be right. I loved every one of them. I wondered how my grandmother in the ribbon factory during the war would’ve fitted in.

Great characters all and very well played. Each one clearly defined early on, no messing. Nice clear scripting supported by simple direction and uncomplicated acting. Neat storytelling, relying on the punch of the words and their delivery. Everyone different and balancing against each other perfectly. Enough given away to know there is a bigger story or two out there in the wings but that we will have to wait to hear them. A precious ring and a grammar school kid for starters. Great stuff. Nothing spectacular; realistic and homely.

[quote]‘We were on the bus and this woman wouldn’t stop singing - someone shut that woman up, they said. Shirley Bassey it was.'[/quote]

And funny. A terrific bombastic lead with a right few pals around her but no one hogs the show. This is partly because of the singing. We sing. We’re Welsh. We can’t help it, apparently. It turns a play into a musical and in those moments, we get the chance to breathe and to think and to piece it all together. The songs are clever, witty, sad and funny, and really well sung. There are some really good voices on that stage and they add to the individuality of the women, they make them even more solid and agreeable.

And as a retired factory worker in the audience said, ‘We were on the bus and this woman wouldn’t stop singing - someone shut that woman up, they said. Shirley Bassey it was.' We all like a tune to take home.'

We are shown a film too. A touching vignette of a tea dance in Porthcawl wrapped up with Tom Jones. And there they were, some of them, sitting just in front of me. Truly delightful and very much part of the story of the factory workers but I wasn’t sure how this fitted in with the play. Perhaps it was just a reminder of the continuing zest for life they had, in spite of or perhaps because of, the hard work and their fights for rights. And to remind us that they are not all dead, it is not that long ago. Keep up.

Discussion afterwards is relevant and interesting. It has the feel of an audience wanting to be heard, full of ideas and histories. More men comment than women. Maybe they still just shout louder. Different people from different backgrounds suggest different angles – more facts, more slog, more reality. There is enough of all of these. These women found fun in what did, they were the trailblazers for our freedoms and quite frankly, we could learn a thing or two from them.

This play will help them teach us, if only we listen.