I had the pleasure of talking to the amazing and inspiring writer and director, and associate director at 20 Stories High, Ameera Conrad about their upcoming Who The F*** is Shakespeare coming up at the Unity. Ameera’s passion for the show, 20 Stories High and theatre was infectious, she started her journey in theatre in South Africa where she grew up, studied,

I was a stage manager, lighting tech associate. I was a dresser, worked on the bar in drama school, I’ve done every job in theatre, and I think that that really gave me a real deep respect for all of the different aspects of theatre.

After moving to the UK, it was when she was the associate director at the Actors Touring Company when she found out about 20 Stories High from Matthew Xia who said ‘These are exactly the kind of people you should be working with. They’re radical, they’re activists, they’re pushing forward the industry in the right direction and in the kind of direction that you want to be pushing the industry in.

And so when I started learning about the company, seeing the work that they made, I was just so inspired and so keen to come up here. I’ve always loved Liverpool. I’ve been an LFC fan my whole life, and I always thought, oh, if I can live in the same city that Steven Gerrard lives in, that would be really cool!

WTFIS started as a performance Ameera made with the Actors Lab which was Ameera’s conception, a training model for young actors in Merseyside who want to learn a step up from the fundamentals of acting,

I wanted it to be focused on the people who are part of the program and making sure that they had something that was specifically for them and all the kinds of topics that they were interested in exploring as artists. And so when we found the group of performers, I knew going into it that I was going to write something or create something that also had a combination of classical text and modern text, because I think it’s so important in actor training to have experience of performing classical texts.

So that’s where the concept came from, to create a combination of classical Shakespearean text and my own writing. I’ve always loved Shakespeare and been interested in how his femme, women, or queer coded characters get treated in his plays. Very often the sort of academic explorations of them are a lot more exciting and interesting and ground-breaking than the performed versions of them.

I asked how the process of making the work happened…

I picked the characters based on the individuals in the group, as opposed to me going like, oh, I definitely want to talk about Ophelia. It just so happened that those characters became some of the most and are some of the most iconic characters in Shakespeare’s works.

Going into it, I had written a script, partly because I thought with actors in training, it can be quite jarring for such a short process to create a text and perform in a limited time. We did workshop it in the room and changed bits that didn’t feel right. Where possible, I do change

text, especially with my own writing. I’ll just be like, I’ll check with the writer and then I’ll just spin around in my chair. The writer says yes!

I saw the first version a year ago and thought it was fantastic, and such a brilliant and powerful showcase for the young actors involved. Now it’s being developed into a professional show with a new cast and is touring, I asked what is different this time…

We’ve taken out some of the Shakespeare scenes to put in some more modern text. But that’s the sort of big change that’s happening. And then I suppose another change is that where we ended up with the cast is that each of the performers comes from a different region in the UK.

Beca, who’s playing Viola, is from Northern Ireland. Jada-Li is from the Midlands. Mary is Scouse and Harriett is from the South.They all have very distinct sounding accents. And we felt really excited about the prospect of people hearing Shakespeare in a Scouse and a Northern Irish and West Midlands and a Southern accent all at the same time. Because it just Shakespeare just makes so much sense when it’s not in RP English.

I’m also really excited about working with Mal Lidgett again, who was the composer, beat maker from the first production. We’re going to make more music for it. So there’ll be a lot more verse and beat poetry and rap sort of styles within the show.

This is Ameera’s last project with 20 Stories High, and I can’t wait to see the new version of the show, which I’ve no doubt will be powerful, playful and inspiring

To be able to take a show on tour across the Northwest and to London with a piece that came from a training program that I helped create, a show that I’ve written and I’m directing, it’s such a beautiful full circle moment for me.

Book tickets to Who the f**k is Shakespeare?: https://www.unitytheatreliverpool.co.uk/whats-on/who-the-f-k-is-shakespeare/

Book tickets to Ameera’s Workshop: https://www.unitytheatreliverpool.co.uk/whats-on/to-speak-or-not-to-speak-definitely-speak-performing-shakespeare-with-ameera-conrad/

 

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