Since the start of the year Oxford Playhouse has been collecting stories of courage and conscience from Oxford residents who stood up for something, or someone, they believed in. Six of these stories have become STAND, a celebration of ordinary people changing their corner of the world.
It’s a very simple set up: six actors sit in a row on the stage in West Oxford Community Centre on Botley Road and tell the stories of six members of our community. They listen to each other, laugh occasionally, but they do not talk to each other. They talk to us. They talk to us intimately because what we hear is not a script. It is the real words, painstakingly transcribed from a series of interviews that writer/director Chris Goode conducted with real people. Every ‘um’, every ‘like’, every hesitation, deviation, and repetition is here, creating an incredibly special atmosphere where the audience is eavesdropping on someone else’s (albeit rather one-sided) conversation.
We meet a man who admits that he only really started campaigning at university because there was a girl in the society that he fancied, but who went on to stage protests against BP; there’s the woman who now works with refugees, whose own childhood sounded so difficult that it seemed she did so-called rebellious acts just to take some control over her own life; 82 year old Albert who stands on South Parks Road for four hours every Thursday to protest against animal testing; a lady from the Broken Spoke Bike Co-operative who had some hilarious stories about anti-fracking protests; a man who campaigned to stop the closure of the Jericho boatyard, taking photographs of the vibrant life that went on there; and the very moving story of the lady who tried to bring up her adopted daughter to be brave, and to stand up for what is right.
Hearing each of the stories in the tellers’ own words was incredibly powerful, and was enhanced by the way that they were slowly revealed, as parts of one person’s narrative naturally led into another’s, and back again.
I wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing STAND, having concerns that it all sounded rather worthy, but I was so wrong. It was a privilege to be a witness to these personal experiences,and to feel such a wonderful sense of community, though I did also feel like a bit of an inferior human being in the presence of such passion, whether their stands were successful or not.
Inspirational, funny, moving, I can’t recommend this highly enough. ★★★★★ Deborah Sims
