Hard To Let

Background

The Sumner Women’s Drama Workshop began in 1984 when a group called “Mothertongues” from New Peckham Varieties came to perform “The Drum Game” at the Welcome Nursery on the Sumner Estate.  Inspired by that performance, the Welcome Nursery women asked for a drama group of their own;- could Teresa  come and lead them?

She could.  

The idea of doing the usual type of drama workshop – for example some exercises, maybe a bit of an improvisation, maybe reading some scripted stuff – flew straight out of the window. The women were filled to the brim with stories – a catalogue of horrors which had never found a listener. For ten weeks the teapot was on the table, we talked, and  stories were told.  More and more the topic centred on the way that the women, and their children, were forced to live. Their homes, if such they could be called, came perilously near to being uninhabitable.

Most of the stories had not been mentioned before. The women, mainly single parents or new-ish immigrants, with children and little or no earned incomes were not going to speak of  problems with their housing to anyone. Something wrong? They were  the ones to blame. The greatest fear-  not an unrealistic one –  was that  “the social” would come and take away their children. Maybe these conditions might be all they deserved?  How could they tell anyone?

The talking changed all this. It was only us. As the stories came out, first cautiously, and then with growing confidence, one after another admitted to having the same problems. It became obvious to everyone that the problems were not personal. They could be spoken about.

A great energy was thus created, which carried the group through working out the common threads of their experiences and binding them into a story. First the women improvised, and then created, rehearsed and polished the play, and then bravely, six women performed it to a live audience. The play was never fully scripted, and the words are the words of the women themselves, as they spoke them in life, and in performance. Some Councillors from LB Southwark saw the performance, and offered to fund us to film it. This is the film we made.