a heartfelt archive theatre
Making local histories into theatre is vital and significant, as it charts our memories and perspectives into alternative narratives that challenge the partiality and biases of hegemonic “official” history. From Brian Friel’s Translations to Alecky Blythe’s London Road and Milo Rau’s Five Easy Pieces, local histories have found myriad voices in theatre: verbatim or musical, fictional or documentary.
Similarly, The Switchboard Project, created by Doubletake Theatre and directed by Molly Byrne, attempts to retell the history of LGBT lives in England. Set in 1985 above a bookshop in King’s Cross, it follows four lesbian volunteers answering calls from vulnerable individuals. Jackie (Áine McNamara) just passes her training session. Lou (Fatima Abdullahi) and Joan (Megan Keaveny) are committed activists (and ex -lovers), while Nana (Hannah Balogun) disappears for a long time. Together, they work for the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, a helpline that offers lifelines to isolated lesbians and gay men. In the meantime, their own relationships begin to fray: Lou is preparing to leave Switchboard, while Nana and Jackie start to see each other.
With the AIDS crisis looming, The Switchboard Project ambitiously tackles numerous issues including patriarchy, lesbian’s visibility and credibility, and whether (or the extent to which), lesbians should act as the “big mommies” taking care of everyone even within this community. While Jackie believes in gay and lesbian’s “familial bonds” as sisters and brothers, Joan argues that AIDS is not really the lesbians’ responsibility as they are the least risky. Jackie and Joan are like poles of an intersubjective spectrum, luring its audience to navigate their own positionality. What makes The Switchboard Project unique and distinctive, I reckon, is its rejection of simplification. It doesn’t depict the LGBT community as a flattened “whole”, but with a dedicated intention to display the micro-powerdynamics within the community alongside the external socio-cultural discipline.
The cast of four is exceptionally strong, embodying four recognisable “lesbian tropes” with nuance and complexity. Keaveny captures Joan’s over-educated ego and high self-esteem, while also revealing her fragility in scenes with Abdullahi’s at-ease, quietly supportive Lou. McNamara plays Jackie as hyper-empathetic, and her chemistry feels just as right with Balogun’s Nana, a timid and fearful, but in nature kind-hearted English teacher.
Partly fictional and partly ethnographical, The Switchboard Project is ambitious. On one hand, I can see its immense potential if developed into a compelling TV sitcom. On the other hand, however, as a theatrical piece, it struggles. Its first hour, with our four heroines answering calls, falls quite incoherent when set against the more conflict-driven final half-hour. The callers’ stories come across as unprocessed raw material directly derived from the archive, lacking their own intact storylines. It is equally hard to piece out the internal connections between their stories and those of the four crews, let alone these key questions raised in this play. Its social-cultural context feels a bit off too, only slightly hinted by Dan Southwell’s set design with a Thatcher’s poster on the wall. Instead of solid embodiments of the social context, we just hear repeated manifestos of government hostility. While the phones are clearly the most important props in this production, they haven’t, either symbolically or ontologically, exhibited their ultimacy.