Working with dad: John Godber and daughter Elizabeth on co-writing a new musical

If there is advice warning against such collaborations, John and Elizabeth have chosen to ignore it and have co-written a brand new musical.

That’s John and Elizabeth Godber, by the way, so maybe not entirely inadvisable, nor an enormous surprise.

John is of course the former artistic director of Hull Truck theatre, the man behind Bouncers, Teechers, Off the Piste and a string of other award-winning plays. Perhaps then there was an air of inevitability that his two daughters might follow him and his wife Jane into the business of show.

Still, to actually write a play together? The pair’s first joint effort is Ruby and The Vinyl, a new musical which opened at Theatre Royal Wakefield this week.

“It was very easy to collaborate with Liz, she was almost born at Hull Truck, so she spent most of her formative years watching rehearsals with me. She even had a rehearsal sandwich box.

“In truth sometimes she was in rehearsals for shows that might not always have been age appropriate, but I thought she wouldn’t pick up much stuff as a four-year-old. I was wrong. Liz has always had an interest in storytelling,” says John.

For Liz, there definitely was something inevitable about her path. “I think it would be difficult to grow up in my house and not want to go into theatre, it was like something exciting was always happening, and I don’t think I ever even considered a different career. With my whole family, including my sister, working in the industry, it would be strange to me now to do anything else,” she says.

“It was a huge part of my life growing up, but I didn’t really think there was anything weird about it, it was just my life. I would go with my Dad to his rehearsals on a weekend, and sneak into the back of the theatre or the lighting desk to watch shows.

Our house was always full of actors or stage managers staying, production photos on the kitchen table and props and costumes across the sofa, it was just a huge part of my everyday life, and it still is, only now the actors are staying at my house.”

After studying English at both Hull and Leeds University, she is now a PhD student in English and creative writing at Hull, which her playwright dad says ‘keeps me sharp’.

Ruby and the Vinyl is a true family affair for the John Godber theatre company, directed by John’s wife and Liz’s mum Jane.

It tells the story of Ruby’s Pop-Up Record and Vintage Clothes Shop, a place where magical things happen and where Lily and Tom meet one wet afternoon. With music and lyrics by Ruby Mackintosh, a rising Wakefield artist who has featured on the BBC.

With so many collaborators, how is it working the room, really?

John says: “Because Liz is in rehearsal I guess she has the last word, in fact last week we were chatting about rehearsals and I mentioned that I liked a particular section in Act Two, and she just turned around and said, ‘I’ve cut that. It’s gone, it was too much.’ So I didn’t have much choice. I think there comes a moment when you think, well she was born in a theatre, she must have picked something up.”

Liz adds: “I wanted to write Ruby and the Vinyl to, in many ways, explore my own experiences of going to university and feeling isolated. Although it is by no means autobiographical, I really wanted to explore the student experience, and I feel like the show really encapsulates those first few weeks of trying to find your feet at Uni.

"I also really wanted to write a modern romance, and I think that is where you can really see my influence in the show – I want the show to have the feel of a classic romantic musical, but with a very comedic and 2022 twist.”

The play has been in development for six years, beginning as an East Riding Council Libraries tour, with the writing duo returning to the script and story during lockdown. John says it wasn’t planned as a “tonic to Covid, we seem to have captured some kind of magic that just starts to make you feel good about aspects of the world.”

As one of Britain’s most performed playwrights who has been garlanded with Olivier awards and BAFTAs, one assumes it must have been daunting for the daughter to follow in his footsteps, but John is a great supporter.

“I’m always reminded of what my Dad says when someone says to him, ‘your John’s done well!’ My Dad, who is a prolific poet, and still lives in Upton says, ‘I would have been proud of him if he’d been a binman’.

“I think he’s the one who keeps us all rooted. After all, writing plays is just another job at the end of the day. It might seem romantic, but you have to enjoy your own company,” he says.

When asked if there were any reservations about the two of them working together, Liz says: “The only thing I thought was that, despite being related, me and my Dad have very different working styles: he prefers to get up in the morning to write, whereas I’ll write into the night.

“However, we worked out a working pattern for us, and it all seemed to come together in the end – mainly with us meeting in the afternoon after our individual writing sessions.

“This is my first piece of writing to be performed since lockdown, and it has felt like such a privilege and a joy to be able to work with my Dad on it, that certainly has felt very special. I’m now just excited for people to see it.”

Ruby and the Vinyl – In Ruby’s pop-up record and vintage clothes shop magical things happen: people fall in love, find themselves, sort their lives out and restyle their look. When Lily meets Tom there one rainy day they go from perfect strangers to inseparable lovers. But is everything quite as it seems?

At Theatre Royal Wakefield to February 12 (01924 211311). East Riding Theatre in Beverley, March 1-12 (01482 874050). Bridlington Spa, April 7-8 (01262 678258).

For more information about the John Godber Company visit www.thejohngodbercompany.co.uk

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