Meet the Godbers - a theatre family

He is Britain’s third most performed playwright (after Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn) and with his wife they are arguably the nation’s leading acting-writing-directing married couple.

We’re talking about John and Jane Godber, who have collaborated on a new production which had its premiere (a world premiere, no less) on home soil in Beverley last week.

John has written The Empty Nester’s Club with the town’s East Riding Theatre in mind. But this time it will truly be a family affair – a two-hander starring Jane and the couple’s youngest daughter, Martha, with elder daughter Elizabeth acting as stage manager.

The play, about the experiences families go through when their children leave home, will strike a universal chord. Like all good theatre it has been written and crafted from personal experience. Martha, 18, known to the family as Ma, has just completed her first year at LIPA, the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, while Elizabeth, 21, has been studying creative writing at Hull University and is just about to move on to complete a Master’s degree.

“Compared to Shafted (Godber’s play about the Miners Strike that’s just completed a UK theatre tour) Empty Nester’s is a much more commercially-minded project. Yes, it’s something we have experienced but it explores feelings that will be familiar to any parent whose children have left home,” John tells me as Family Godber enjoy a now all-too-rare Sunday together at their home in Swanland, on the outskirts of Hull.

“It was the things that were touching us directly which led to me writing the play. But I had also looked to see if anything had already been written about the experience of your children leaving home and all that empty nest stuff, and nobody had.

“There were a few books, American books, but they were self-help things, about coping with it all, so I thought ‘There’s a play here’ and started to dig a little deeper.”

Jane plays Vicky Barrett, who is holding the inaugural meeting of The Empty Nester’s Club, a self-help group for parents. “The premise is that our audiences will have been through many of the same things – the endless trips to Ikea, motorway service stations, long goodbyes and the tears,” says John.

“But what happens as the play unfolds is that Martha’s character appears and tells her story of what she felt like leaving her mum and going away from home and all the stuff you get with freshers’ weeks and so on.

“The real pulse behind writing Empty Nester’s is that suddenly you realise your kids aren’t there any more and you’re suddenly approaching birthdays you’d rather not approach,” says John, 60.

“What happens in the play is that not only do the kids’ change but the parents change and then the kids don’t like the fact that their parents are changing into people that perhaps they don’t like. But the bottom line is we deserve the right to be the people we want to be when our kids leave home and that’s the territory the play investigates.”

He says mums often have a desperate feeling they are losing the bond between mother and child. “But it’s difficult for dads, too,” Jane chips in. “It is to do with love and how you let your kids develop, but it’s at great personal cost. A few tears are shed along the way.”

They both recall driving their daughter to Liverpool for the start of the university year. “When we left Ma in what was allegedly high-spec student accommodation but what was basically just a room in a very cheap European hotel, I just couldn’t look her in the face,” John says.

“But then I was telling my dad, who’s 85 now, how upset I felt and suddenly he was telling me similar stories of when they left me in Wakefield when I was training to be a teacher. He told me ‘we used to go and look in your bedroom at home and cry, me and your mum, but we couldn’t tell you that because you were a big fella and playing rugby and all that’.”

Sister Martha meanwhile has her sights set on a successful acting career and says “ten years from now I’d love to think I would be working in television drama”. She says: “I’m very lucky to have had my mum and dad be able to offer me opportunities like this. I’ve always wanted to go to drama school and although I dabbled with dance for a while and was offered a place at a dance school, once I did the audition at LIPA I really felt at home there,” she says. “It’s a great environment and I like the fact that it’s in the North. I had the chance to go to London but I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.”

She, too, can relate to the play. “I think there is that thing of going to university and part of you just wants to forget all about home,” she says. “It’s all great initially when you’re out with your mates but then, after a couple of weeks, you do start to miss life back home and having things done for
you.”

For John and Jane working with East Riding Theatre at Beverley reminds them a lot of the early days when John came to Hull more than 30 years ago as artistic director of a struggling Hull Truck Theatre. “I walked into my first board meeting to be told the company was bankrupt. I thought, ‘Funny – nobody mentioned that at the interview.’

“It was funny for me coming from teaching to run Hull Truck as a director and becoming a playwright, almost by accident. I wasn’t employed as a playwright but I thought ‘there’s no money so I better write a play’ and it turned out to be Up n Under.”

Bouncers followed and a whole lot more which helped steer Hull Truck from the verge of bankruptcy to a theatre with an international reputation and, finally, a purpose-built £15m theatre which he helped design.

Shortly after the new theatre had opened the then Artistic Director, Gareth Tudor Price, was made redundant, and Godber, in a gesture of support to his long time friend and artistic colleague, left Hull Truck, after a relationship of 26 years.

In 2011, he set up The John Godber Company with Jane and at the same time they formed a partnership with Theatre Royal Wakefield to produce two tours of his work each year. Since then his plays have been seen by more than 100,000 people.

The Empty Nester’s Club was written specially for East Riding Theatre, although it will go on tour later. It represents a continuing and burgeoning relationship with the theatre that opened in December 2014. “It’s great space which reminds me a lot of Hull Truck in the old days at Spring Street.

“We can try things out there and
 it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. It’s a really lovely little theatre with some great people running it. It’s got a family atmosphere that’s really supportive and East Riding people
 have always turned out to support my plays.”

The Empty Nester’s Club runs at East Riding Theatre, Beverley, until June 25. For tickets go to www.eastridingtheatre.co.uk.