Port

St Thomas' Hall, Canterbury, May 2018

Simon Stephen's Port is a love story about hometowns, set in Stockport; a town of departures. With 'yer A6 for yer cars. Yer got yer viaduct for yer trains. M62. River fuckin' Mersey. Flight paths down Ringway'. It's about leaving home, coming back and trying to find peace with your beginnings.

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I directed and produced an amateur production of Port in 2018 and played a lot with music and film. The show spans fourteen years and the period and location are so specific in the text I wanted to use every available aid we had at our disposal on a student budget to take the audience there. I acquired two huge '90s television sets to sit either side of the stage and during scene transitions they played home videos of Racheal at her current age in the play and with the people in her life at said age. These were all underscored with hit songs from the relevant year. At the end of the show, the television sets rewound all the videos back to back before Rachael left the stage for the first time.