New play opening in Alnwick focusses on trials of Northumberland village life

Posted by The Journal on Feb 24, 10 09:14 AM in What's On

Playwright Mary Cooper came to Northumberland to find out what the locals thought of village life in the county. She talked to Culture's DAVID WHETSTONE about her new play, premiering tonight

Ah, the peaceful pleasures of village life! No traffic jams, no tower blocks, helpful and friendly neighbours, rolling green acres all around and a constant symphony of birdsong. What's not to like?

Playwright Mary Cooper in Alnwick

Well, the answer to that question might come out of Mary Cooper's new play, A Village Life.

Commissioned by Northumberland Theatre Company (NTC), it opens tonight at Alnwick Playhouse and I'd hazard a guess that a few home truths of a rural nature might be in the offing.

Taking a break from teaching on an Arvon Foundation writing course near Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, Mary reflects on her many encounters on the highways and byways of Northumberland - and also at the bus stops of Pegswood.

"I spent a lot of time in Pegswood waiting for buses. I hate driving so I always use public transport but it made me realise what it's like if you don't have a car.

"If you are poor in Northumberland, you stay in one place. I did an awful lot of hanging around on streets in the early part of last year."

Mary, who has been writing professionally since 1986, was commissioned to write the play in 2008 and spent the first half of last year researching.

"I didn't want to write a play plucked out of the ether. Coming up to Alnwick to have a look round, I decided I wanted to talk to people and find out what was on their minds."

What was on a lot of Northumberland people's minds was property prices.

"Finding a home, if you are a young man in a not very well-paid job and your wife is pregnant, you'll wonder how you are going to find a good place to bring up your family.

"This was something a couple of people mentioned at first in passing and I started to wonder if it was more acute in Northumberland than in other parts of the country.

"I found that house prices in Northumberland rose more from 1995 to 2005 than in any other part of the country, partly because of the growth in owning second homes."

Country Life magazine identifying Alnwick as the best place to live in the country perhaps didn't help the cause of the hard-up local home-seeker.

"The county had a largely stable population and property market for a long time but I think there was a lot of money generated in the south that was looking for a home," conjectures Mary.

"The banker gets a bonus and thinks: I could buy a whole estate in Northumberland.

"Even among my limited circle of friends I know people who have bought massive houses in Northumberland."

Talking to people on buses, trains and on the streets, Mary says she found "a mixture of resentment and also of 'Well, no bugger else is putting money into the place'."

Mary, who grew up in York and now lives in Leeds, says she isn't a country person but her mother was brought up in a village and her grandmother ran a village Post Office, "so I have a sense of what it was like to live in a village.

"My grandmother was divorced in the 1920s so she had to protect her respectability above all else. Her reputation was everything."

You wonder if it matters quite so much these days.

Mary recalls: "In one village I met a woman who had run the village shop for years and years but now her house is the only one occupied full-time.

"She had grown up in a community that had felt very solid but the children had moved away and other people had died until she was left alone.

"I think in Northumberland some of the things that are happening around the country are happening in a crystallised form.

"There's the loss of post offices, schools, doctors' surgeries and vicars. The vicarages are being sold because the Church of England needs the money and often these have been where the Brownies met or the church fete happened, so there's suddenly a big hole in the social centre of the village. Pubs have closed and garages, and although it's happening all around the country I felt in Northumberland it's happened more suddenly and is coupled with this steep rise in property prices."

Mary says the "old fashioned issue of boundaries" is alive and well, with disputes over where gardens end and common land begins. But a new phenomenon has entered the equation - the wind farm.

"Now there's this new dispute over the use of the land," Mary says.

Having talked to locals rich and poor, and to the "blow-ins" - those in-comers drawn by the prospect of a rural idyll - Mary devised a list of characters for her cast of five and the plot (based on a Best Village contest) of what she describes as a serious comedy set in the fictional Northumberland village of Aldale.

There are Toby and Rachel, newcomers from London who have bought the village chapel and school; then there are Margaret and Colin, up from a big provincial city to settle in the incongruous suburban-style 80s home. There are "the people from The Dene, the council estate, who are pretty much just getting by"; and there's the "Lord of the Manor", another London in-comer.

On the plus side, Mary says she found most real people she met extremely helpful and friendly.

A Village Life is at Alnwick Playhouse tonight and tomorrow before touring. Call Alnwick box office: 01665 510 785.

For details visit www.northumberlandtheatre.co.uk

Scene from Mary Cooper's A Village Life