‘I am a Socialist‘ says playwright and folk singer Lizzie Nunnery. “ and if there is one good thing about the rise of Corbynism then it is the fact that the word ‘Socialist’ is back on the agenda.“
One of Socialism’s creeds is a championing of the underdog, and Lizzie’s whose play Narvik opens at Home in Manchester next week, has shown that in her previous work. Millie struggling to support an invalid father and two teenage children by unwinding sisal threads in 1854 Liverpool or Canaan, a refugee from Zimbabwe who has been living in Liverpool for the last five years
“I think I am getting more political the older I get”, she says. She grew up in the suburbs of Liverpool and lived around the city centre, the last four in Toxteth, a place she describes as brilliant.
Liverpool, its history and politics have always inspired, especially the politics that has affected her city, her family and her friends for decades.Lizzie says that she has always been drawn to the outsiders and the underdogs and to the issues that make people outsiders and underdogs.
She is currently working on a play which will be performed at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool this May which will focus on austerity and the cuts.
“We have a false rhetoric of simple maths at the moment where people are asked to judge themselves in terms of what they put in and what they take out…It demoralises people and wears out their confidence, we need to go last that and value our lives in different ways”
Theatre has an important role to play in the ever confusing way that our politics is going, she feels, the blurring of the lines between lefts and right, along with music, both have a way of humanising issues, applying a subject such as austerity to an individual. In the process you make the issue real to an audience that up to that point might have seen it only in the abstract.
Which brings us to Narvik, certainly not as political as her earlier works.The place sums up in a word to many one of the early disasters of the Second World War. In fact, it was a great naval victory for the fleet in a time when the country stood alone against the Nazi Hegemony in Europe.
The inspiration came from her grandfather, who sadly died just before the play was premiered in Liverpool in 2015, his stories of being on the Arctic convoys during the war, an unexplored area of the war, Lizzie believes, the stories of clothes being frozen to the skin, hosing down the deck with boiling water just to stop the ship being frozen solid.
As the story developed, Lizzie says she became fascinated by this generation of boys who sailed into war and finding that everything that they had known had been cast into doubt in so many different ways.
The short term victory in the battle of Narvik, for Jim, the central character in the play, it feels like a moment of clarity and glory.He feels victorious and certain if his moral position at that moment in time but the rest of the war doesn’t allow him to feel like that as he encounters different situations.
Narvik is a love story, Jim meets a Norwegian women before the war and is striving to get back to her but without giving too much away from the plot, when he returns to Norway after five years of German occupation he is shocked.
At a time when everyone is talking about post truth, some of the moral dilemmas in the play seem even more pertinent now than they were when it first came out in 2015, what stories to believe and how to measure ourselves against the world.
Lizzie is looking forward to the play coming to Home in Manchester and is greatly enthused by the city’s new artistic space and the ambition of the people running it.
The play is going to fifteen venues after Manchester across two months, a week at the Bluecoat in Liverpool and then finishing with a week in London.
And then there is her music, her debut album, The Company of Ghosts came out in 2010 to much critical acclaim and in 2012 the follow-up Black Hound Howling, on which she worked with Vidar Norheim, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and shimmer from the Liverpool Norwegian band Wave Machines.
The two careers, says Lizzie developed alongside each other, there was no plan.She started going around acoustic nights in Liverpool at the age of seventeen, the Acoustic Engine being a favourite where loads of really good artists inspired her to write music and sing.
While at University she wrote her first play and it went to the Edinburgh festival and then returning to Liverpool joined the Young Writer’s group at the Everyman Theatre, her first, what she terms, serious play came through that programme, while all the time Lizzie was writing songs.Music was always important to her in the plays she was writing, continually thinking about how to being those two together.
So a busy year for Lizzie in 2017, we have already mentioned the Everyman production in May but before that she is back in Manchester at the Royal Exchange working on a Ukrainian production which focuses on issues of censorship, part of a wider project funded by the British Council to get directors from countries where censorship is an issue, bringing it to the UK to reach an audience.
Lizzie Nunnery’s Narvik opens at Home Manchester on Tuesday 31st January Details
