Telling Lives by Eric Northey

TELLING LIVES at MANCHESTER’S 24:7

Dolly-Rose Campbell interviews Telling Lives author, Eric Northey on the show that puts Prestwich Asylum centre stage!

Dolly-Rose Campbell, star of Cul-de-sac theatre’s new play, Telling Lives, feels that her role as Lily Handley is a ‘dream part’ for a young actress. The play has been selected for Manchester’s 24:7 theatre festival in July, so she went along and asked writer Eric Northey, how he came to write a play about the lives of patients in

Prestwich asylum.

DRC: OK! Let’s start at the beginning. What on earth made you write a play about life in a Manchester Asylum!

EN: Well, like all creative chances, there was a bit of luck involved. I’d been researching an old mill in Ancoats at the Greater Manchester Country Record Office – a much more exciting place than its name suggests – and I’d found absolutely nothing! A completely wasted day. I was just about to pack up and go home, when one of the archivists suggested I look at one of the Admission books of Prestwich County Asylum, which they had acquired and which had been rescued from a skip when the old Prestwich hospital was closing down. I’ve always been interested in mental health issues, so I thought why not? Train’s not till 5 o’clock. So, she brought out one huge volume, the size and weight of a paving slab, leather bound, with gold embossing on the spine and plonked it on the desk. I blew the dust off it and turned a page. And I was hooked. It was the most amazing human document I’d ever seen.

DRC: What was so special about it? Was it not just dry as dust hospital records?

EN: Far from it. Every patient from the 1850s onwards had been named, photographed, weighed, their jobs, marital status and religion noted; they were inspected for bruises, given a ‘cause for madness’, offered a brief prognosis, then followed up – sometimes over many years, to see how they had progressed in the asylum. There were family details, letters, bits of conversation, medical histories, very moving accounts of deaths etc, all written in what was sometimes quite elegant copperplate handwriting – other times in a scrawl worse than my own. It was a historical treasure trove, detailing the lives and loves of ordinary working-class Mancunians from another age. Amazing! Hundreds –thousands, of them.

DRC: were they all mad?

EN: Probably not. You got three meals a day in the asylum. You got sod all outside. But at least for some people – their families, the police, the workhouse managers – they were all people who could no longer cope with life, or, more often, they could no longer be coped with. So, it was felt necessary to put them away.

DRC: what kinds of things made people mad?

EN: All kinds of things, some of which are with us still, some, thankfully, have been

mitigated or cured. There were illnesses you might expect – delusions, depression

(Melancholia, as it was), alcoholism, epilepsy, religious mania, paranoia; at least some of which might have been triggered by the terrible poverty of Victorian and Edwardian Manchester. But, for me at least, there were causes I didn’t expect: masturbation apparently made you mad! So, that’s half the youth of England gone

mad. There was General Paralysis of the Insane, the polite term for syphilis, which of course was a terrible scourge before anti-biotics. The painful deaths of these patients are neatly recorded in precise detail by the attendants who ministered to them till the very end. Quite a contrast to today, where you may well be shoved in the back room of a care home and left to get on with it. And there were more middle-class people who had ‘business reasons’ or ‘bankruptcy’ as the causes of madness. Like today, there were plenty of discharged soldiers who had seen terrible things in wars abroad. Perhaps the most moving causes were the emotional triggers, like loss of a baby, or a child, or one which was cited as “death of a dear friend”, and one category which was surprising, yet fairly common, was ‘disappointment in love’.

DRC: were they all Mancunians?

EN: By no means. One of the first to catch my eye was Constantine Metallinos, a young Greek medical student who had come from Corfu. His father was the Patriarch at the Greek Orthodox Church on Bury New Road who had forbidden his son from marrying the girl of his dreams – whoever she was. So, poor Constantine took poison in his grief and was put into Prestwich. And of course, the archive contains large numbers of Irish people who were building modern Britain throughout the last century; there were travellers from Scotland and Wales and sometimes Jewish immigrants who had come fleeing programs in Europe. I even found one Indian gentleman.

DRC: did anyone in particular get you writing?

EN: Well, I think everyone gets inspired when they see the picture of Lily Handley. She was just so extraordinarily beautiful. She looks directly at the camera and her full lips have a wistful half-smile. She tips her head to one side as she gazes at us. It’s hard not to interpret it as some kind of appeal to the viewer to hear her unspoken story. It appears her mother had a drink problem so Lily was adopted by relatives and ‘indulged’ according to the record. She plays a kind of five-finger exercise when interviewed, so maybe that means she had piano lessons somewhere. She had a baby when she was 21 – without a husband – “an accident with a young man” as they used to put it, and after the birth, she was melancholic with the baby blues. She

couldn’t cope and went into the asylum in 1900, came out briefly on trial, but was readmitted the next year. You can see the ravages of the disease on the later photograph. We now know that she spent the rest of her life in the asylum. Who was the father of her baby, what happened to the child, did she ever see it again, and did her lover ever visit her? Who knows? These unanswerable questions at least got me started thinking about a play which told something of her life – even if much of it has to be fiction. Somehow, she seemed a symbol for the many thousands who went down into oblivion unknown, unremarked – but I suspect, not unloved.

DRC: and that’s my ‘peach of a part’! And are there big themes as well as individual lives?

EN: I think so. Recently, I’ve been thinking that the play is really about struggles and

resilience, as much as it is about illness and defeat. There’s the struggles of the patients just to stay alive and barely sane, when poverty, ill-health,

pretty brutal social circumstances conspire against you. There’s the struggles of

the staff – particularly the enthusiastic Dr Perceval who thinks he’s got a new cure for madness. The turn of the last century was the great period of getting to grips with how the brain works, and of course, the great humanitarian psychiatrists like Freud are working in the period before the First World War. There’s endlessly patient nurses and attendants who could be abused by patients but who hadn’t to retaliate (it was a sackable offence and people were definitely sacked for retaliation against violent patients.) There are the perennial struggles to get money for the asylum. Who was to pay for all this high-quality care? Governments want everything on the cheap, just like today. And for patients, again like today, it’s a long hard struggle to get your voice heard once you become mentally ill.

DRC: were the asylums really as gloomy as people think?

EN: I really don’t believe they were, at least not until after the First World War, when

that catastrophe affected all British institutions. I’ve set the play in 1914 to mark that change, since the good doctors and good nurses went off to the front and many, of course, never came back.. That’s when the fifty year decline really starts and it continued until they were closed down in the 1970s.The Victorian asylums were built to very high standards, with marble tiles, good laboratories, stained glass windows, aspidistras everywhere, beautiful gardens, farms, and usually, a brewery on site. So there were jobs for people who were well enough to do them. And they were certainly preferable to the dreadful slums that many of the patients would have been used to. There were sports days and bands (Elgar ran an orchestra in Powick asylum) and dances on Friday nights. The food was very good and you can see the difference

in the weight of the patients between admission and discharge. Often, just three

good meals a day was sufficient to get people back to health.

DRC: should we really be interested in things which happened 100 years ago?

EN: I think so, yes. Brecht, in whose style the play is performed, said that those who do not know there history are forced to repeat it. And that’s certainly true in the care of the mentally ill. We still have soldiers coming home irrevocably damaged by war;

women still have their babies taken from them – sometimes for the best of possible

reasons in order to protect a child, but it damages. Britain today still has problems with STIs, alcoholism, poverty, bad housing, physical abuse – particularly of women. So, we’re not really that much further on than the Victorians – though we have got better drugs than they had, which enables more people to live productive lives in the

community.

DRC: well, I can say that as an actress, I find this a really challenging and intensely fascinating role and it’s great to be part of Cul-de-sac’s team. When can the general public see Telling Lives?

EN: well, there’s a couple of 24:7 previews at the Buxton Fringe festival on July 15th and 16th. One at the art gallery and the other at the URC church in Buxton. And then there’s the fabulous Manchester24:7 theatre festival, when people will be able to see seven brand new plays in various venues across Manchester. Telling Lives will be on at Sasha’s hotel between the 21st and 29th of July. Details will soon be on the 24:7 web site, http://www.247theatrefestival.co.uk/ So, come along. Bring your extended family. And tell all your friends to come along too! And their extended families!

Telling Lives by Eric Northey

Friday 3 June 2011

About Telling Lives

Wednesday 18 May 2011

An interview with writer Eric Northey

Monday 2 May 2011

Telling Lives @ 24:7

See Telling Lives Preview @ Buxton Fringe