Some People Feel The Rain
Spinners Mill’s pop-up theatre saw performances of ‘Some People Feel The Rain’, a play by Leigh’s own Kieran Knowles. George Walker reviews as part of STAT's Wigan Arts Festival coverage.
Some People Feel The Rain is the latest creative gem from Leigh’s very own Kieran Knowles, a playwright whose work has often captured the spirit of building community and social bonds in spite of what life throws at you. His latest creation debuted at the Wigan Arts Festival, a cultural showing of the North West’s best, with 2021’s offering focusing on Leigh. The venue of choice was a pop-up theatre in Leigh at the Edwardian Spinner’s Mill; an icon of the region’s past, revivifying its present. The stage itself is just outside the mill, a small but ornate offering with a proximity between audience and actors that allowed for dramatic intensity, covered with a roof of typically industrial corrugated iron. It is really something special; and sitting there on a sunny Friday evening, watching the region’s best creatives and their work, was a unique experience.
Speaking to the writer Kieran, I got a sense of what makes his creative spirit thrive; his regret for how towns like Leigh’s social and economic life has been compromised, and a spur to action to create and facilitate art that reinvigorates those communities that need it most. On the idea of rain Kieran told me about the initial thought process behind the it: “I thought I’d use rain as a metaphor, there’s a Bob Marley lyric which is ‘Some people feel the rain and others just get wet’, and it’s about how you experience life and how the influences that happen to you can really influence the choices you make”.
Kieran told me that his metaphor came him to through his experiences living in and talking to the people of Leigh. “It was this idea that it’s been pretty relentless, and the policy hasn’t been created for Leigh, decisions haven’t been made with towns like Leigh in mind. And so, it was about this pressure that has always been on the town, and the personality and accounts of the place that have come out of this pressure”.
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| pop-up theatre at Leigh Spinners Mill |
The play itself centres around three generations of women dealing with the rain; a storm that erupts first in their local town, then spreads across the country, and just won’t stop. The tension begins notwithstanding the storm, with mother and daughter Amanda and Jo bickering about trivial issues like revising for exams, or stress at work, the standard in living rooms and kitchens across the country. The internal tension soon ends up absorbing the family from the outside, as trains and planes are cancelled, people they know lose their homes, and community support hubs are set up at the local supermarket.
I found Kieran’s metaphor to be obvious to me having talked to him about the play, but more something to be found and dug into deeper as the storm got worse, intensifying both the drama on stage and the social and political messages of the play. As something monotonous that incrementally chips away and gets worse as it goes on, the rain is a perfect metaphor; however it also works as a dramatic device due to the way it is used as something that literally brings the community to a halt. Off stage libraries, churches, train services, community centres and the rest have been slowly closing around the UK for the past decade, and this is explicit in Kieran’s work and outlook. “We’re not replacing them, we’re replacing them with virtual spaces or shops, and the difference between what we’re taking away and what we’re replacing them with is that the things we’re closing were aspirational, and community based, and conversational, places that you went to meet people or talk to people”.
It’s credit to Kieran, the wonderful actors and the production team that this metaphor was so strong and wholistic that at times I struggled to fully differentiate between the storm of mother nature and that of austerity. Decrepit public transport and boarded up high streets are now such inexplicable signifiers of the past decade, that as this imagined world collapsed the real and the imaginary bled into each other, lending the play emotional ballast and realism without ever veering into sentimentality or didacticism.
“It was this idea that it’s been pretty relentless, and the policy hasn’t been created for Leigh, decisions haven’t been made with towns like Leigh in mind. And so, it was about this pressure that has always been on the town, and the personality and accounts of the place that have come out of this pressure”.
As the storm rages on the family grow closer and closer to panic, fighting about where they’re going to go, how they’re going to protect themselves and what their priorities should be as the community around them collapses. This tension also grew through soliloquies from the young daughter Jo, interspersing the main plot to draw on memories past of going to watch the football in the drizzle, and eating egg custards with her granddad. As the storm builds the football stadium becomes engulfed, as the games are first cancelled, then the league, before the mystery club goes into administration, leading Jo to fits of incandescent rage and distress.
I say mystery, because as Kieran told me the problems are addressed aren’t unique to Leigh. “In the play I never mentioned the word Leigh, it’s not about Leigh, it’s about this sort of northern identity, and how these towns have been left to erode ungracefully”. There’s a keen sense of the play using the hyperlocal context as a springboard to diagnose national problems of decline; take the drama itself, it’s one small household, of three people, but their experiences and the crises they face speak to so much more. “I do feel like the bigger issues are linked to the little issues in a way and no-one’s looking at the little issues. If we can get some of them right, then some of the bigger issues will be solved as well”.
As the play ended, I have less and less notes being so spellbound by the play’s closing drama as I was. I won’t explicitly spoil it, but the show closed with a stirring speech from the grandmother Beth. She demanded attentive listening, as the social and political metaphors bubbling below the surface were explicitly addressed, and images of former industrial prosperity and the potential for seizing a bright future were conjured by her words. I left the play with a beaming sense of pride and excitement, with the feeling of butterflies fluttering through my chest I wrote just one word to describe the finale: inspiring.