Home Straight

Brighton Racecourse, Race Hill, Thursday, July 23

“A LOT of the time East Brighton feels separate to Brighton. Nobody goes there unless they live there. It’s almost a different town – I remember somebody saying to me they had been to a primary school of five to seven-year-olds where some had never been to the beach.”

Writer Frank McCabe is working with 12 young people all with connections to East Brighton to create a promenade piece set around Brighton Racecourse.

The project by site-specific theatre company Hydrocracker’s youth branch Firecracker is in collaboration with director Julian Kerridge, who has previously starred in Coronation Street and Fat Friends.

“We wanted to think about what home means, and what makes somewhere home,” says McCabe of the project, which was co-devised with the young actors, taking in 200 years of history.

“People find a sense of home in all sorts of different ways. We touch on people being displaced for economic reasons, how in London people are being forced out.

“With the history we looked at the pressure on people to maintain a home – each era presented its own challenges of what home meant. It was about sparking interest with bits of history – the hook for them was not about the drama or theatre, but about real lives.”

Rather than turn up with a script, McCabe worked with the young actors to find out about the issues which they felt strongly about.

“We only finished the script with a couple of weeks to go,” he says. “The spirit of the exercise was that it should come from them as much as me.

“When you’re working with younger people in the arts it’s about giving them a voice – and in theatre the words can sometimes feel set in stone and inaccessible. If you can say to young people it’s about what you want to say and how you express yourself you’ve hopefully got them for life.”

McCabe admits the racecourse was always their first choice for a location.

“There were some brief discussions about doing it in other places, but the racecourse is such a landmark in East Brighton it was obvious,” he says.

“All the action takes place on the grandstand. We have worked out an economical path for the audience, so they are never going upstairs, they’re always coming down. It has been an interesting process working out the locations. In my memory the grandstand was a lot of concrete steps, but when you explore it you find other little areas and weird quirks. It’s an interesting space.”

As for the future McCabe would love to see the play restaged, and is interested in exploring other areas of the city.

“A lot of the elements would work in other areas,” he says. “When you go up to the top of the grandstand, where the public don’t go, you can see all the way around, from Roedean and the Marina to Hove – you realise how big and varied the city is.”

For now he is focusing on his production company Two Bins, which is recreating Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend as a two-part production at Brighton Open Air Theatre from Wednesday, August 19, to Monday, August 31. See www.brightonopenairtheatre.co.uk/

Starts 5pm and 7pm, tickets £5. Visit www.nightingaletheatre.co.uk