Run at it Shouting presents 'The Dwarfs'

The Original Dwarfs: Mick Goldstein, Harold Pinter, Ron Percival

FROM THE DIRECTOR Welcome to this rehearsed reading of Harold Pinter’s THE DWARFS, adapted by Kerry Lee Crabbe.

Early in Lockdown i had phone call from a young actor i’d directed in his final year at drama school in a production of Harold Pinter's THE BIRTHDAY PARTY. Charlie MacGechan told me he’d realised that he needed to stay busy, and was using his company Run At It Shouting to offer free or by-donation industry events on Zoom, with the proceeds going to the NHS or similarly pressured charities. With names like Mike Leigh, Amma Asante and Bruce Robinson saying yes to Charlie, i could hardly decline his invitation to collaborate on a Pinter project.

Like Harold before him, Charlie lives in Hackney where one charity his members have already supported is doing fantastic work, undaunted by the health emergency. The NIA Project was founded in 1975 and works to end violence against women and girls. NIA have observed an appalling spike in domestic violence in Lockdown, reflected in a 50% rise in SOS calls to the National Domestic Abuse Helpline (https://www.nationaldahelpline.org.uk).

Written as a novel in the early 1950’s before he had written a play, we chose this theatrical version of Harold Pinter’s THE DWARFS because it is rarely produced, and is about young people in Hackney finding their feet in incredibly challenging times. THE DWARFS provides a sort of key to the entire topography of the Pinterland that unfurled over the fifty years or so that followed.

Another reason for choosing this play is that the story contains a relationship between a young man and a young woman that has taken a violent and abusive turn.

Finally, we turned in this emergency to the alwaysinspirational Harold Pinter for high-stakes drama, wonderful humour in dark times, and especially for his universal embrace of compassion and generosity.

Harold teaches us to look the darkness we all face square in the eyes and not back down.

Charlie leads our cast, to whom we are most grateful for their time and commitment. We are also indebted to Judy Daish Associates, Kerry Lee Crabbe, Karen Ingala Smith, Shaun Chambers, Joseph Alexander Goode, and Kate Morley PR. THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING THE NIA PROJECT AND WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THE READING. Harry Burton

HAROLD PINTER'S THE DWARFS ADAPTED BY KERRY LEE CRABBE CAST VIRGINIA - Stacy Martin MARK - Charlie MacGechan PETE - Lewis Rainer LEN - Ossian Perret DIRECTOR Harry Burton PRODUCTION - Run at it Shouting CO-PRODUCER & PROGRAMME - Jessica Walker TECHNICAL HOST - Shaun Chambers ART WORK - Joseph Goode PRESS - Kate Morley

The Hackney Gang

HAROLD PINTER A Nobel Prize-winning playwright, actor,

screenwriter, poet, director, human rights campaigner and cricket-lover, Harold Pinter was born in 1930 in Hackney, East London, and died in 2008.

He wrote twenty-nine plays including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal, twenty-one screenplays as well as directing twentyseven theatre productions.

ABOUT RUN AT IT SHOUTING Run At It SHOUTING was a dramatic society based in Haverhill, Suffolk, founded by Frances MacGechan in 2003. Frances worked passionately with members of the community, producing theatre and performing arts courses. Sadly her passing in February 2007 left a huge void in many of our lives and subsequently everything stopped for Run At It SHOUTING. It has been our mission since then to bring back the company in her memory. Now, it specialises in Film & Theatre Production | Acting Workshops | Industry Q&A's. runatitshouting.co.uk

ABOUT THE NIA PROJECT nia runs services for women and girls who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution.

They offer community based services in Hackney, Haringey, Barking and Dagenham, Waltham Forest, Redbridge, Tower Hamlets, Havering, Newham and Brent and Brent. nia has been delivering services for women, girls and children who have experienced sexual and domestic violence since 1975. niaendingviolence.org.uk/

HARRY BURTON INTERVIEWS KAREN INGALA SMITH, CEO OF THE NIA PROJECT Karen Ingala Smith has been Chief Executive of nia since 2009. Under Karen’s leadership, nia has maintained an unapologetic feminist commitment to prioritising women who have been subjected to men’s sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution.

During an unfavourable economic climate, Karen has not only ensured nia’s survival but built upon its reputation for responding to the needs of the women and children it serves.

ON LOCKDOWN

For me, I think the most important thing is to understand that there aren’t suddenly more violent men in the world. They were there, they were being abusive, but what we’ve got with lockdown is a pressurised situation where women may be locked up with a violent, abusive partner and he has another tool of control at his disposal.

Alongside this there may be additional financial pressures. But it’s important to know non-abusive men don’t become abusive if they have financial pressures. It’s important to recognise those dynamics would have been there to begin with.

We also know for some women getting in touch with organisations such as NIA is more difficult to begin with: because he doesn’t leave the house, or at least not in the first 12 weeks of lockdown. So it was harder for some women to get support. That said I know the National Domestic Abuse helpline got a massive increase in calls and the Women’s Aid website got a big increase in hits as well, so women were finding ways to reach out for support.

NIA had to move all our services away from an office and communitybased situation to staff working at home, so we had to adapt. Like everybody we discovered Zoom, we hadn’t used it before, so we started using it to have some meetings with women. Obviously a lot more telephone contact and then as lockdown eased we moved into being able to work with women in the community more; going with them to appointments with the police, or wherever they might need to go.

But we kept nearly all our services running. We also run two refuges which we didn’t want to close. Both our refuges have staff on-site 24 hours. There was just one service we weren’t able to run - our van which we send out in the night time to work with women involved in street prostitution; to make links with them so they get to know about us and can access our support during the day. But also to give them a hot drink, check that they’re okay, something to eat if they haven’t had something .

ON TOXIC MASCULINITY

I think first we need to talk about how men control themselves, and how men are assumed to have lost control in an abusive relationship.

What we’ve found is that these men are very good at controlling themselves when they go to work, they’re very good at controlling themselves with other men. It’s that they choose not to use that control in their relationships. I do think there is a role for everyone to learn what a non-abusive relationship is and what an abusive one is.

I hesitate to use the word healthy relationship or unhealthy relationship because that’s not what we’re talking about, and that can be quite heteronormative. So we need to understand what abuse looks like and what trust looks like, how to love somebody and not control them, and not feel insecure.

A lot of that is to do with not finding our self-esteem in other people. So for men there might be that sense of entitlement and that need to control, that expectation to have the last word. Because those are the norms that a lot of us grew up with. It’s about deconstructing that.

WHAT CAN MEN DO TO HELP?

I’d rather start by looking at what men can do in society to be better human beings, and I think the best place to start is with some self-reflection on your attitudes to women.

Look at your relationships, look at your relationships with your peers - if you see them being a dick, telling sexist jokes or making unkind sexist remarks about a woman, do you challenge them about that? So I think there are so many things men can do amongst themselves to make the world better for women.

In terms of supporting NIA why don’t you challenge masculinity? Why don’t you do a bake sale!? Financial support to a charity is really important and that does help us keep going and delivering the services; but sometimes, when we get a bit of extra money through, it helps us to develop the services that we know women want, rather than those that a local authority wants to pay for, and those can look very different. niaendingviolence.org.uk/

HENRY WOOLF ON HAROLD PINTER & THE HACKNEY GANG We were a group at Hackney Downs Grammar School. About four or five of us.

And we stayed together, with one marked exception. And this brought about a novel by Harold, The Dwarfs. One man, called Ron Percival who defected, absconded from this group. We might have looked pretty obnoxious to other people, but we were just determined to be unoppressed by the horrors of our time. It was 1947, the full nastiness of humanity, the concentration camps, the gulags, were just being revealed. And on the glorious democratic side: Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima; the predictions that the world would starve to death in fifty years. All these things we were all fully aware of. And we were determined not to be oppressed by. This wasn’t a consensus opinion - we individually arrived at that, and we were full of gaiety and larks and humour and desperation. And love: we, one or other of us, was always in love - with a woman I hasten to say, our masculine credentials are absolutely impeccable (methinks he doth protest too much).

We never had any money of course, young men didn’t in those days. So we’d bowl around Hackney and its environs quoting the latest play we’d seen. There were no rules of membership. We just liked each other’s smell, you know the general sniff as it were. And but if you ask me now what were the rules for joining the group, there were no rules. But there was a general sniff we all shared, and if you ask me to define that I’d say an absolute appetite and interest in absolutely everything that was going on around us. Our own lives particularly. We were extraordinarily solipsistic. We were very, very selfabsorbed, but in an innocent way. And we really were so very interested in each other’s lives.

THE HACKNEY BOYS SHARED A PASSION FOR INTELLECTUAL DISCOVERY AND ARGUMENT ABOUT IDEAS. THAT, AND THE SENSE THAT THEY WERE ALL OF INDEPENDENT MIND. NOT ONE OF US ADHERED WITHOUT QUESTION TO ANY GIVEN, TO ANY STATE OF AFFAIRS OR SYSTEM OF THOUGHT. NOT ONE OF US. THAT WAS WHAT WE RECOGNISED IN EACH OTHER. Henry Woolf

The River Lea flowed with its deluge of dead dogs, stinking tin cans and stewed cut-throat rats, in a gutter round the belly of Hackney.

Hackney itself, an East End satellite, brimmed over with milk bars, Italian cafes, Fifty Shilling tailors and barber shops. Prams and busy ramshackle stalls clogged up the main street; street violinists, trumpeters, matchsellers.

Many Jews lived in the district, noisy but candid; mostly taxidrivers and pressers, machinists and cutters, who steamed all day in their workshop ovens.

Up the hill lived the richer, the “better class� Jews, strutting with their mink coats and American suits and ties. Bookmakers, jewellers, or furriers with gownshops in Gt. Portland Street.

The younger generation sported on the wide pavements outside the Delicatessen Stores and one special Jewish pintable saloon, which overflowed with young quims and clammy champions not yet out of their wanking chariots.

Harold Pinter's Queen Of All The Fairies

HARRY BURTON TALKS TO KERRY LEE CRABBE, ADAPTOR OF THE DWARFS Kerry Lee Crabbe’s playwrighting credits include The Burn (Edinburgh Festival Fringe), The Last Romantic (Wimbledon Theatre) & Rough Magic (New End Theatre). His screenwriting credits for film include Innocent Lies, The Playboys, and Memoirs of a Survivor; and for television his credits include The Last Romantic.

When you boil it down I think THE DWARFS is about something pretty universal. I quoted to Harold at one rehearsal a bit of that poem of Larkin’s called Sad Steps, about getting up in the middle of the night.

Larkin looks at the moon and it reminds him, he says, of the strength and pain of being young, that it can’t come again, but is, for others, undiminished somewhere. Harold lit up, and the next day I got a copy of Harold’s favourite Larkin poems, and it was one of the ones he had selected. That registered for him: that it’s about youth.

For most of us the equivalent would have been the years of higher education, the college or university phase. These characters who are mostly self-educated (after Hackney Grammar, obviously a superb school) feel so like undergraduates, they’re so fly, clued-up and wellread. I remember Henry Woolf saying it was always Harold who led on that front, he was the one who found the books, the new writers, the new territory. His recommendation was law, they’d all just devour what he was on to. So it’s about leaving home, leaving those close school-formed, study-formed friendships.

THE DWARFS embodies an astonishing nous and sophistication about the rite of passage of those boys particularly, catalysed by the young woman.

It’s that phase of leaving home, joining the workaday world, and gradually, as we discover by the end of the play, the whole constellation splitting apart.

Will those friendships survive? How long for, if at all? Everybody can identify with that. Equally fundamentally, equally universally, it’s about friendship.

These friendships in the play are as deep as any I know in the literary world, considering the comparative youth of the people depicted. They are so familiar with each other and they, I feel, for years have given each other no quarter. These friendships aren’t indulgences. Somebody said, very cruelly, that English friendship isn’t worth much because it’s untested.

For this post-war generation, plus the Jewish tradition of Disputation these characters bring — well I would be frightened of being part of that group! I like to think I would get the hang of the way they cut and thrust, fence and stitch each other up verbally. But it is verbally very abrasive, tough, witty — you go through the wringer with these young men. They won’t let each other off the hook.

The dwarfs referred to seem to be an invention — dark, sometimes comical, sometimes terrifying and fantastical — a series of riffs of Len’s. When he’s alone he seems to go into this world of the dwarfs. Sometimes they’re company for him, at other times they are scary warnings. But there are times when his riffs about these imaginary dwarfs seem to chime in parallel with what’s actually happening between himself and the other guys.

The very last episode, for instance, when Mark and Pete have had their showdown, and it seems like it's curtains for that relationship, the last riff of Len's about the dwarfs is very much about the circus leaving town, everything's been packed up. There's a barrenness, something's finished.

So I think of the dwarfs as Len’s slightly self-protective way of thinking about himself and dealing with the others. He deals with them and himself by saying: ‘We’ve got to grow up.’ It’s the rite of passage again. ‘We’ve literally got to be bigger than this, outgrow these routines, the patter, the familiar gags.’

The full interview can be found on www.workingwithpinter.com

STACY MARTIN PLAYS VIRGINIA Stacy's film credits include Casanova, Last Love, The Night House, High-Rise, Tale of Tales, Jouers (Treat Me Like Fire), All The Money In The World, The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, The Childhood of a Leader, An Evening Hour, Vox Lux and Nymphomaniac. Her new film Amants is about to open at the Venice Film Festival.

CHARLIE MACGECHAN PLAYS MARK Charlie's film credits include We Die Young, The Girl From The Song and Deus.

In Lockdown Charlie has revived his late mother's company, Run at it Shouting, which has offered workshops and industry events throughout the pandemic.

LEWIS RAINER PLAYS PETE Lewis's theatre credits include Angus, Thongs and Even More Snogging (West Yorkshire Playhouse); and for television his credits include Grange Hill, Dani’s House, Death Come To Pemberley, Endeavour, After Louise, The Crash. Films: Flyspy, A Hologram For The King, And Then I Was French and The Girl From The Song.

OSSIAN PERRET PLAYS LEN Ossian's television credits include The Witcher, The First Team, The Last Kingdom and Sanctuary.

He is currently shooting the TV series Glow & Darkness, about the life of St Francis of Assisi, in which he plays Celino De Podio.

DIRECTED BY HARRY BURTON

Theatre credits include: The Leisure Society, Out There On Fried Meat Ridge Road, The Dumb Waiter (Trafalgar Studios), Casualties & Positive (Park Theatre), I Found My Horn (Chichester & Hampstead), Where I Come From (Kentucky Rep), Barking In Essex (Wyndham’s), Blue On Blue (Tristan Bates Theatre), The Dog Walker (Jermyn Street).

Radio: Ashes To Ashes. He has directed two films for Channel 4, documentary Working With Pinter, and a drama: Thinspiration.

During Lockdown Harry has led a series of Pinter workshops on Zoom. See WorkingWithPinter.com

CO-PRODUCED BY JESSICA WALKER

Jessica is a recent graduate of Drama Centre London. Alongside directing, she specialises in movement psychology both as an acting coach and movement director.

TECHNICAL HOST SHAUN CHAMBERS

Shaun trained at The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) graduating with an MA in Performing Arts in 2009. During lockdown Shaun directed the world premieres of five plays in a 'DOING' series written by David Spicer especially for live performance on Zoom.

Shaun jointly set up award winning Phoenix Youth Theatre and in 2015 co-founded The Northern Comedy Theatre.

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