Sharma about their reworking of the 2005 play One Under. A production exploring human
relationships and mental health, One Under comes to Curve Tue 29 – Wed 30 Oct and is a
Graeae and Theatre Royal Plymouth Production, commissioned by Ramps on the Moon and
presented in association with Curve.
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| Stanley J Browne & Reece Pantry in One Under. Photo by Patrick Baldwin |
puzzle of a play One Under had its world premiere, with Graeae’s new version of the work about to
embark on a national tour, this tale of Londoners that fall through the cracks has arguably never felt
more of the moment. “The play had always left questions for me,” the playwright insists, “I’d always
wanted to return to it.”
One Under starts with a suicide – its title being the term tube drivers use when somebody jumps in
front of their trains – before tracing the impact of that incident on several Londoners whose lives criss-cross like tube lines: the train driver, convinced it meant more than mere coincidence; the deceased’s foster mother, coming to terms with her grief; a local dry cleaner who met the man immediately before he passed away. In the process, One Under nudges up against a number of prevailing issues: mental health, urban environs, precarious existences and marginalised identities.
Most prominently, Pinnock’s play captures something specific about city life: the way millions of us
brush shoulders every day, co-existing across a vast shared space. “I’m a Londoner and that’s how
we live, isn’t it?” Pinnock explains. “You’re constantly colliding with strangers and there’s a possibility for great intimacy in that, as well as explosions.”
Those encounters, born out of physical proximity, tend to transcend the looser boundaries of identity.
As such, Pinnock’s play presents a cross-section of the capital. “It’s completely intersectional,” insists
director Amit Sharma – and that’s something that Graeae, the UK’s leading D/deaf and disabled
theatre company is perfectly placed to explore. The new version will feature a cast of disabled and
non-disabled actors.
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| Reece Pantry & Clare-Louise English in One Under. Photo by Patrick Baldwin. |
Sharma continues. “It doesn’t talk about the failures of structures in society. It talks about the
consequences of them.”
Pinnock picks up the thought: “When people talk about poverty, I don’t think they talk about what it
can do to people – physically, mentally; the sort of things people have to deal with as a result of living in poverty.”
“That hasn’t changed,” she stresses. “It was the same when I was a child, when I was a teenager when I went off to university. What happens is that it gets worse for people because governments
make it harder. This government made it harder – and then blamed the people they’d made it harder
for.”
Sharma sees the erosion of the welfare state as having exacerbated the precariousness of life in
poverty, sharpening the problems of an unequal society in the process. “I’m not saying that, in 2005
everyone else was doing cartwheels, but there was a level of support and, over the last 14 or 15
years, that’s gone.”
Partly as a result, Pinnock is having a purple patch, some might even say a renaissance. Having
emerged in the late Eighties as a vital new voice, the first black British woman to be staged at the
National Theatre, she had watched her work recede from mainstream stages in recent years.
Fashions changed. Commissions fells away.
However, a pivotal intervention changed that. When Madani Younis revived her masterful full-length
debut Leave Taking at the Bush Theatre in London, starting its Passing the Baton initiative to re-
establish a black British canon of modern classics, it introduced a new generation of artists and
audiences to her work. Pinnock has since won the prestigious Alfred Fagon award for her latest play,
Rockets and Blue Lights.
That her writing has been neglected is, Sharma says, “a tragedy” – part of a wider erasure of
marginalised voices in British theatre. “Winsome’s a hot new thing right now,” he jokes, fondly, “but
Winsome herself has been here. It’s people’s perspectives and lenses that haven’t.”
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| Evlyne Oyedokun & Stanley J Browne in One Under. Photo by Patrick Baldwin. |
rollercoaster.” She believes Passing the Baton “has changed quite a lot” in itself but thinks her
playwrighting style might chime with the times. Her plays are about people more than they are plot. “I know it’s a bit contentious to say, ordinary people,” she expands, “but they are exploring ordinary
people and everyday lives, and showing them to be complex, intelligent and very interesting.” Her
characters come with authenticity too. Born in Islington to working-class Jamaican immigrants, she’s
always written the world around her. “I’ve lived with these sorts of characters, grown up with them,”
she says. “They’re fascinating to me.”
With Graeae reviving One Under, it adds another layer of intersectionality. “Whatever marginalised
group you’re in, disabled people are probably the very first group to be shat on,” Sharma explains.
“It’s hard being a disabled person. In fact, it costs £500 more a month in this country.” That fact only
exacerbates the poverty portrayed in the play.
“The reason this feels like a Graeae play is because the company’s most successful plays have been
rooted in people,” Sharma adds – the point being that D/deafness and disability sits alongside and as
part of the human experience. It affects everything: sex, communication, mobility – and mental health.
“Mental health is absolutely part of the disabled experience,” he stresses. “Where the perception of
Graeae revolves around physical and sensory impairment, it felt quite apt to put mental health front
and centre.”
One Under runs at Curve Tue 29 - Wed 30 Oct. To find out more and book tickets, visit
www.curveonline.co.uk
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