Can a play or a movie change the world? Can it make even a small permanent difference to the way people think? I hope the answer is yes, because an idealistic project going on in South London deserves that answer.
It’s a new play called Shanked — the title is street slang for being stabbed. And that’s its subject. A mobile phone is stolen at a party. A fight erupts and a kid gets shanked. The implications for everyone occupy the rest of the play.
So far, you may think, so predictably urban-gritty. But the circumstances that gave birth to the play, and led to its premiere on Monday at the New Wimbledon Studio Theatre, are far from what might be expected.
The drama was written and is being directed by Natalie Flynn, a feisty 27-year-old single mum who grew up on a rough estate in South London and now lives on another with her eight-year-old son. She wanted to write a drama that reflected the intimidatory atmosphere on those estates, but also showed the devastating impact that a stabbing has on the teenagers involved and their families and friends. “There is no anonymous platform for the victims to talk about their experiences and feelings,” Flynn says. “I wanted the play partly to be that platform.”
But she also realised that the play wouldn’t be heeded by hard-bitten youngsters if it was seen as being just another lecture from adults, albeit one disguised as a drama. So six weeks ago she plastered posters all over the neighbourhood asking for volunteers to help her put it on, whether they had stage experience or not. She was overwhelmed by applicants, especially from kids who had been involved in, or touched by, knife crime. Indeed, one of the youngsters playing a leading role was himself stabbed in Croydon.
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Just as extraordinary, however, was the response that Flynn received from big organisations. “I approached them with the attitude that if you don’t ask, you don’t get,” she says. More likely, she touched a raw nerve that made people feel that they had to respond. The Metropolitan Police certainly did: it is providing part of the funding for the show, and the borough commander for Merton, Dick Wolfenden, has issued a statement stressing what a vital impact he feels the play could have. The local Tesco has donated props. Merton Council and the area’s football club, Tooting and Mitcham, have provided rehearsal facilities. MPs and councillors have backed the project.
Even more importantly, it has received the support of the Damilola Taylor Trust, set up in memory of the ten-year-old schoolboy who received a fatal wound from a broken bottle when he was attacked in Peckham. And Colin Knox — father of the 18-year-old Harry Potter actor Rob Knox, who was knifed to death three years ago when trying to protect his brother — is helping Flynn to turn Shanked into a film.
Whether or not that happens, it seems certain that her play will be taken up by other London boroughs, and probably staged elsewhere in the UK as well. That sort of exposure must be welcomed. As Flynn points out, the casual carrying of knives — and, increasingly, guns — is often regarded as a “gang culture” problem, yet it often intrudes into the lives of all sort of youngsters, even those living in leafy suburbs. Since my own son witnessed a cold-blooded gang murder in daylight in northwest London, I can attest to that — and to the courage it takes for any kid to step forward and help the police with their subsequent inquiries.
But back to my original question. No matter how powerfully written or sincerely presented, can Shanked change anything? Do plays ever? People usually cite the impact of Ken Loach’s great TV drama Cathy Come Home, which led to the revision of laws about unemployment and eviction. And on these pages two weeks ago Benedict Nightingale wrote about the impact of John Galsworthy’s Justice, which triggered prison reform. But the fact that those plays are respectively 45 and 101 years old suggests how rare it is for drama to have that kind of effect. And they led merely to changes in the law (merely!). Changing the way that people behave, and especially the way that disaffected, peer-led kids on estates behave, is even harder.
But a play created on those estates, and drawing on the real experiences of everyone in it, surely has more chance than most. Anyone who has read Grahame Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock — or, for that matter, Romeo and Juliet — will know that there’s nothing new about youths killing each other with blades. What is new, and troubling, is the feeling among teenagers in many areas that it is normal to carry a knife, either for protection or to be cool. If Shanked speaks to those youngsters in their own language about the suicidal folly of such a mind-set, it should be toured to every dark corner and mean street of our troubled cities.