Shuggy Boats is finally ready to set sail
A cast packed with North East talent is coming together at Live Theatre to bring writer and BAFTA-winning Jacquie Lawrence’s debut play to the stage.
For almost 10 years, Shuggy Boats has been true to its name - rocking back and forth between pages and screens of all sizes - but never quite settling.
It has been a novel, a web series, a sitcom script, a feature film screenplay and - at various points - a casualty of development limbo.
Now Jacquie Lawrence’s defiantly North East story will premiere as a stage play at Live Theatre, Newcastle. Directed by Fiona Macpherson, the cast is led by Phillippa Wilson (Pitmen Painters) and Dave Johns (I, Daniel Blake).
“It’s taken less than a year to get from feature screenplay to stage play to raising the money,” Jacquie says. “But really, it has taken pretty much 10 years to get here.”
The seeds of the play were planted in her novel Different for Girls, where two minor characters - sisters Maeve and Angie - barely registered on the page. But when Jacquie adapted the book into a web series, casting Denise Welch and Charlie Hardwick in those small roles, something shifted.
“We had cinema screenings, and I remember watching the audience,” she recalls. “They really engaged with them. They loved them. They were laughing. These two little characters became massive. I knew we had to tell their story.”
A sitcom script followed. Development funding was secured. Sizzle reels were shot with Denise as Maeve, Charlie as Angie and Dave Johns as Maeve’s husband, Jocka. But the project stalled. A feature film adaptation - envisioned as a North East-set indie in the mould of Letter to Brezhnev or Billy Elliot - also found itself in “development hell”.
“At that point I thought I’d be well into retirement by the time anything happened to get this project out there,” says Jacquie, communicating frustrations which TV and film makers everywhere will recognise.
It was Dave who suggested the reframing that would finally set the story afloat. “He said, ‘Could we play this?’” Jacquie explains. “So it was back to the desk. Take the feature film script out of the drawer and turn it into a stage play.”
When she says it like that, it sounds straightforward, but it actually proved to be the hardest reinvention yet.
“It was a real pivot for me as a writer,” says Jacquie, who also makes a point of crediting executive producer, Fizz Milton for being '“integral” to getting the project a platform.
“Trying to get all of the story from 20 characters via seven and have all the action happening on stage in the moment… that’s been the biggest challenge.”
The premiere at Live Theatre feels less like an incoming booking and more like a return. Jacquie grew up in Scotswood and West Denton, “on the proper estate”, raised among who she affectionately calls the “provvy women” - neighbourhood Provident collectors who loaned and gathered small sums among friends and family.
“There was something benign and communal about it,” Jacquie says of that world. “If someone didn’t have the money, you’d find a way. It was creative. It was kind.”
Maeve, the play’s ‘fuchsia-lipsticked dynamo’, is a provvy woman. Or more accurately one of the last ones standing.
Set in 2021 when the enduring lending scheme was finally wound up, Shuggy Boats begins at Maeve’s birthday do, where she drops a bombshell.
The play tracks the wide-ranging ripple effects of Maeve’s announcement for her television quiz-obsessed husband Jocka (Dave), her cocky gay son Ryan (Benjamin Storey), her recently bereaved sister, Angie and her niece Carolyn - who has her own life-changing news on the horizon.
As the dust settles on the drama of the party, Maeve enjoys a flirtation with the charismatic and mysterious Fingers (Alicya Eyo - Bad Girls, Emmerdale). What follows is, in Jacquie’s words, “a shuggy boat ride full of chaos, comedy, confrontation and celebration”, veering between Provvy women, the Mastermind black swivel chair and Tynemouth Pride.
Thematically, the play is rooted in her own experiences. Jacquie came out when she went to university, but often wondered what might have happened had she stayed where she grew up.
“What if I’d married? What if I’d lived a straight life and then one day thought, I can’t do this anymore?” she says. “It’s about that authenticity of what it was like growing up gay in the regions.”
As it turns out, she did marry, and has spent nearly 26 years with top-flight television and entertainment executive Dawn Airey, whose own “previously on” reel spans chief executive of Channel 5, managing director of Sky and director of global content at ITV. She is currently chair of the National Youth Theatre and the Women’s Super League, as well as Chancellor of Edge Hill University.
“She’ll probably have another job by the time I get home,” Jacquie laughs.
The couple live in London with their two teenage daughters. But Jacquie’s early life - and the questions that sit at the heart of Shuggy Boats - were very much shaped in Newcastle.
Her own career, spanning commissioning editor roles at Channel 4 and Sky - where she won a BAFTA for Ross Kemp on Gangs - has largely unfolded in the capital, following two years at Stonehills Studios in Pelaw studying producing and scriptwriting alongside Emmerdale writer Karin Young in the late 1980s.
As well as being her first play, Shuggy Boats marks the first North East story Jacquie has told in more than 30 years, since she and Karin made the comedy drama Little Richard Wrecked My Marriage, starring Charlie.
“It’s lovely to be doing this here,” she says simply. “It feels like coming home.”
Shuggy Boats brings together a cast steeped in regional theatre and television, including Natalie Ann Jamieson (Emmerdale, Vera) as Carolyn and Libby Davison (The Bill, Our Friends in the North, Purely Belter) as Angie, alongside Dave and Phillippa as Jocka and Maeve.
There are also screen appearances from Denise and Charlie, as well as Hairy Biker, Si King.
“I’m so pleased Denise and Charlie were able to be involved, having played such an important part in shaping these characters and showing their potential,” says Jacquie.
Phillippa, returning to the theatre where she began her professional career, says she couldn’t be having a nicer time being back in the rehearsal rooms at Live.
“It really is a joy turning up to work with this group of people,” she says. “Me and Libby met each other when we were at youth theatre, so it feels really natural to play sisters. And it’s always a treat to work with Davey. Lots of laughs and good fun.
“Maeve is a really interesting character to play - especially at this huge moment in her life. Rehearsals have been great and feel really collaborative. It’s a script which has a real blend of comedy and poignancy. I think people are going to love it.”
Jacquie says she was “blown away” by Phillippa and Libby’s performances in a staged reading revival of The Awkward Squad - the acclaimed 2012 play which explored themes of female empowerment post-1985 miners’ strike - at The Customs House in South Shields last year.
“They were just brilliant and I’m so thrilled that they were both available and up for playing Maeve and Angie.”
For Jacquie, relinquishing the director’s chair for the first time has been both daunting and liberating. “I’ve directed every story I’ve ever told, whether it be a drama or a documentary, so that was something to get used to.
“But she hears the voice I’m writing,” she adds, speaking of Fiona. “She’s thinking about the action. I’m thinking about the words.”
And she’s enjoying the collaborative spirit Phillippa mentions. “They’ll say, ‘I don’t know if I’d say that – can I say this?’ And more often than not, they’re right. They’re so invested and that’s a real gift for me - and the play.”
Jacquie’s determination to see Shuggy Boats realised mirrors the tenacity that has defined her career. When broadcasters rejected her feature documentary about the women-only Gateways Club in London, fronted by Sandi Toksvig, she self-financed it - crowdfunding and investing her own money until it could no longer be ignored.
“If we don’t tell those stories, they disappear,” she says. “The hidden histories - they die.”
The same is true here. Shuggy Boats is unapologetically regional, fiercely female and unafraid of queer complexity. It is also, crucially, very funny, Jacquie says - infused with the gallows humour and rapid-fire riffing she grew up with.
The title itself captures that spirit: precarious, improvised, occasionally chaotic - but buoyant too.
Whether this stage incarnation is the final destination remains to be seen. “You never know,” she laughs. “It could be a radio drama next. An animation or on the West End stage. Who knows?
“But I couldn’t be happier that I’m getting to make this with these people in this place. And I can’t wait for audiences to see it.”
Shuggy Boats is at Live Theatre, Newcastle from March 6 to 21. For tickets, visit live.org.uk or call the box office on 0191 232 1232.