Timeless

 Last night DC and I attended the Theatre Royal Newcastle to see Our Friends in the North. This multi-themed production started as a play, was eventually a tv series and has now returned to the stage. I was wondering how such a vast production as the tv series would transfer but in fact found the production both gripping, and evocative. It was some time before the tv series was commissioned, the BBC feared prosecution as the stories are closely related to real life events. This and the scale of the tv series provide the contemporary backdrop to the return.

As well as the personal and political themes, class struggles, changing cultures and times play out as we follow (in this version) the characters from the 60's to the 80's. Sitting watching this in 2026, I recall vestigial memories of the 70's and 80's. My grandparents were working class, lived in council housing since moving out of Byker and yet remained culturally rooted there. Growing up I felt both closely related to and distant from this working class Geordie ancestry. They had lived in a location which had held a tightly knitted community and was now... what? Shipyards, heavy engineering and mining together with all the activities that supported and were supported by these vast human endeavors had shaped my relatives and built the environment in which I was growing up. But it was all in decline, disjointed and transitional. Then came Thatcherism. Reams could be written about that but not here, not now. Suffice it to say, themes in Our Friends in the North were writ large. Yet growing up through them, and particularly with a relatively full grab bag of karma, they were just how it was. We don't see the backdrops so clearly when we're growing up, it's just 'normal', the way things are.

This latest stage version uses a chorus to guide the audience through time and plot. He invites us at one point to consider memory and then we encounter Felix who's Alzheimer's is gradually removing his, and Geordie who's memory is lost to alcoholism. We are invited to consider -'memory, is it any use?' whilst we're shown how essential it is. As DC lost his father to dementia and my own father is gradually succumbing to Alzheimer's these scenes are familiar. But it is the broader socioeconomic memories that give the play its emotive force. And in the present we might look out across a bewildering climatic and political landscape and wonder... did we see and forget, willfully not see, or was it all just too lost in the invisible backdrop as it was in childhood, hiding in plain sight? Or is the bigger picture simply that we place one foot in front of the other each day, relatively powerless to halt the repetition of themes which play out in humanity generation after generation?

The twenty first century Northeast of England is transformed from those twentieth century days. It's a mixed and not desperate picture. Newcastle has two universities, Durham and Sunderland each have a university and the region benefits hugely from them all. But there remain ex-mining villages that are difficult to gentrify and who's purpose is gone and without a replacement the communities are vulnerable. The miner's strike features in Our Friends in the North and I remember during the strike thinking that mining was no life for a modern human. I don't recall how clearly I appreciated the economic arguments but on the rare occasions I pass through those villages or go to see an exhibition of  Norman Cornish paintings... well, what about the people? As the years pass there are fewer and fewer people who remember why those villages are there...

Cultural memory was passed to to me through childhood but as indicated above the world I was living in was transitional and the stories seemed of limited value. This is a normal part of history, times change. But there was value, there was meaning and if nothing else there was some kind of grounding. The degree of transition, the pace of change and the associated degree of grounding all wax and wane through various historical periods but the lessons are often starkly familiar. This certainly came over in the performance of Out Friends in the North. It's a work which spans decades and invites us to recast the plot lines over contemporary figures. In this sense memory and belonging and our humanity are timeless. I think it is this timelessness in contrast with a strong sense of history which gives the play its power.