Cathy at Edinburgh Festival

Been touring in Cathy for some time, and the play has gone from strength to strength.  We took it to Edinburgh for the festival where it played for four weeks to pretty much sold out houses at the Dome Pleasance theatre.  Saw some great theatre while I was there too, including ‘The Nature of Forgetting’, a physical theatre piece by Theatre Re, punctuated with beautiful live music, about early onset dementia, which was easily the best show of the fringe and one of the most compelling and moving theatre I have ever seen.  We performed a few more venues in London and finished in Brighton, having been invited by the Labour Party to perform it at their conference.  The venue was packed and it felt kind of weird performing in front of famous faces you see daily on TV and in the media.  There followed an inspirational speech by Andy Burnham about how the Labour Party might tackle the housing crisis and what his council is trying to achieve in Manchester.  Later we were eating fish and chips in a nearby restaurant and the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell spotted us and came over to our table for a chat; he had seen the play in Edinburgh and was really congratulatory, stating how important the play’s message was and how housing would be top of the agenda should Labour be elected again... had a bit of a chat about Brexit too; he ensured me Labour would be challenging the Brexit bill in its various stages.  The play does seem to be touching nerves everywhere its performed, and I myself have a greater insight into what it is to be homeless through outreach work I have participated in with Cardboard Citizens, and working with and meeting their members too; who are truly inspirational people having suffered the indignities of homelessness and extreme poverty.  I have at one time in my life done quite a bit of sofa surfing in London and even lived for a while in a squat in Peckham, but I have never suffered the privations and despair that some of the desperate people I have met recently, and consider it shocking that families have to endure such terrible circumstances in modern day Britain.  But the bedroom tax, housing policy, greedy landlords and a seemingly uncaring government whose recent changes to the benefit system seem to me to be aimed primarily at those in society who are poor and dispossessed seem to my mind to make life even more difficult and challenging for those among us who are at the very brink of despair.  I have now begun to write a play inspired by things I have learnt whilst working on Cathy and inspired by the amazing people I have met along the way.  I think it’s an important modern day dilemma that deserves our attention.  Of course Ali Taylor’s fantastic play addresses some of these issues wonderfully, so I am approaching it from a different point of view; but it’s a massive subject with many, many disparate stories, and one I feel obliged to tackle.