Play puts industrial town’s experiences back in limelight

Over the next few weeks, the town will be celebrated in a different medium when Hot Ice Theatre Company’s Halifax-set stage show The Historians will be touring small Yorkshire arts venues.

Written by Halifax-born playwright and actor Katharine Markwick, the play was first devised in 2009, went on to be a big hit at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2011, was then further developed with the help of an Arts Council grant and was a highlight of last summer’s Halifax festival.

“We are currently fusing the Edinburgh version with the Halifax version,” says Markwick who also appears in the show alongside Susanna Hislop. “The Edinburgh show had more emotional depth and the Halifax one more structural depth. We are not rewriting the whole piece but we are tweaking it.”

Markwick and Hislop met at Cambridge University where they were involved in the Footlights and both also have experience of physical theatre, clowning and comedy. Between them, they play around 17 characters in the show which is set in Halifax in the 80s and 90s and focuses on the friendship between two teenage girls, Mucker and Chucker, against the backdrop of the town’s great industrial past and the national politics of the Thatcher and Blair years.

Markwick says that the image she had in her head when she first started writing the piece was of two girls who used to get on the school bus with her every day. “They were pretty scary,” she laughs. “But they were obviously really good friends. The play is not autobiographical but this is my world; these are the people I grew up with. There is a lot of me in my character, Mucker, and also in Chucker.”

The play interweaves the two characters’ personal experiences with the events – and the music – of the era depicted, a time when Halifax suffered more than its fair share of unemployment and deprivation. Without being overtly political, the play gives a voice to those who may not otherwise be heard. “We were very careful not to make the story too big for the characters, to keep it true to life,” says Markwick. “I hope people will find the show funny and moving and real.”

In writing the play Markwick was also keen to explore the relationship between place and identity and the way in which we absorb the history of where we come from. “I grew up in Halifax and I learnt a lot about it from my grandparents and my mum,” she says. “That’s something that we try to capture – the anecdotal way you learn about your town and the feeling that you are living within its story. I left Halifax when I was 18 but I still feel incredibly connected to it.”

It has been interesting timing for the actors preparing for their tour, with rehearsals taking place in the run up to a certain state funeral. “We mention Thatcher a lot in the play because she is there in the background,” says Markwick. “We are obviously not changing the content of the show, but her passing adds something to it.

“When we were performing at Edinburgh in 2011, the riots were happening. I find that exciting about theatre – this show is over three years old but it keeps finding different resonances.”

Otley Courthouse tonight, then touring. Information on www.hoticetheatre.com