Commons image from the London Picture Archive
By Nick Moss
On 18 January, an audience at The Cockpit theatre enjoyed a read-through of Anna Robinson’s play The Marsh. Anna Robinson is best-known as a poet: her collection Whatsname Street was published by Smokestack Books in 2021. Into The Woods was published by Enitharmon in 2014 and The Finders of London was published by Enitharmon in 2010. She has always had an extraordinary ability to capture a multiplicity of working-class voices with a light touch. She writes as a socialist, a feminist, with an eye to comedy that can turn suddenly sad, as our lives can.
Anna Robinson
The Marsh expands on the exploration of South London working-class history that has always been a theme of Anna Robinson’s poetry. The play is set in a courtyard off the Lower Marsh Market. The action takes place across two days in 1890 and is developed as a dialogue between three main characters as they contend with poverty, sickness, cops and charity workers, bringing them bullshit about self-improvement when what they need is money.
The main characters are Mari, a flower seller in her 60s, Lizzie, a flower seller in her late 20s who works with Mari, and Dirty Gertie, a rag seller from a long line of rag sellers. Lizzie is from a Covent Garden family of flower sellers and has moved to the Lambeth side with her husband, who has a chest condition and cannot now work. They have three young children.
The play is about working-class women grafting and making do, making ends meet, trying to hold things together as the weight of the world presses down. It is about contending with disasters unfolding out of left field, in communities where money is most days a pipe dream, where rags are the main currency – poor people selling rags to other poor people , who live and die in rags.
This all makes the play sound a grim watch, but it’s far from that. It’s funny, sometimes with notes of pure farce (the scenes with the pompous cop could be expanded into effective slapstick in a full staging) and its language moves between sharp exchanges between the characters and moments of real, Blakean beauty when Marie explains her visions of the world of the future she sees for the community of Lower Marsh.
The real drama is inherent in those visions, because they foresee a process of development that gradually excludes the characters populating the area. Slums are cleared and social housing gets built, only to then be demolished in favour of “affordable” housing that no-one can afford – except the upwardly mobile middle class and the penthouse-dwelling rich, who want to watch the river as it bends, from behind triple-glazing.
The Marsh is a play about solidarity between people who have nothing at all. It’s about watching each other’s backs, keeping an eye out, sharing what little there is. It’s about how all that can be ripped apart by rent-seeking capital, but also by a well-meaning social democracy that makes no effort to involve working-class communities in its designs for them, and displaces those communities in deciding what’s “best” for them.
The Marsh is a brilliant piece of writing, and the cast Anna Robinson assembled does it justice. As Mari, Carol Morgan captures subtly a mix of hard-won realism and sudden shifts to awed, frighted premonition. Anne Hayward stands out as Lizzie, quick-witted, dignified, determined to not crumble in the face of sickness and relentless poverty. Katerina Jugati is brilliant as Gertie, who is mocked as “dirty” throughout, both by figures of officialdom who interrupt the scenes, and by her friend, -until she reveals that her “fear of water” is really a fear of typhoid.
This was intended as a “read-through”, but the cast staged more-or-less a full performance. I wonder these days at the point of most theatre. The big beasts of left-wing and avant-garde theatre are either dead now (Trevor Griffiths, Howard Pinter, Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, Sarah Kane ) or out of fashion (Caryl Churchill, David Hare, David Edgar) and the stages are full of revivals or insubstantial crap that pays lip service to “social” drama by way of box-ticking, to ensure the ACE support keeps coming, but does nothing to provoke or challenge the way we’re told things always have to be.
The Marsh is a refreshing change from all that shite. It also clearly can work in any format, whether expanded to full production (it would even work as a Les Mis-style musical) or toured as a piece of stage-it-anywhere agitprop. The Marsh stands proudly in the tradition of Joan Litlewood, John McGrath and John Arden, and of 7:84, Pete Cheeseman, Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre under Alan Dossor and Roger Hill.
It is, as McGrath demanded, “a good night out” – it makes you laugh, but every laugh comes with a sting. Here’s to it being performed time and again – and to the right audiences, in the right places, as McGrath used to put it. To quote Anna’s poem What Is History, Discuss? this is a work that captures all the daily dazzle and catastrophe of working-class life:
It’s in the darkness,
the rose moon, a clear deep navy sky
and a box of Price’s candles to light
the longest street market in London
where we ply, plight and sing a bit.
It’s in the pain of home and the urge
to command that pain with real true facts.
To enquire about The Marsh, see here.
