Northern delights

here’s something deeply inspiring about talking to a guy who went to Wigan’s legendary Casino roughly quarter of a century ago to escape the uncertainties of his job as an engineer in Thatcherite Britain and realise who is now directing a play with music that celebrates those days. Director, producer, actor, choreographer and DJ, Paul Sadot is that guy, and the play he’s bringing to Dublin’s Helix Theatre is called Once Upon A Time In Wigan. With a title like that one half expects Sergio Leone to be providing the soundtrack!

“Well, there is some music at the start that sounds like it could have come from a spaghetti western!” says Paul, speaking on the phone from England. “And, actually, the guy who wrote this, Mick Martin, is from an Irish background; I met him about 20 years ago and I went off to be an actor and he went on to be a playwright. But years later I started a dance company and wanted to start up a theatre so we got together again. And a few years back we developed the play around four monologues and extended it through improvisation form there.”
These four monologues come from people, Paul explains, who are representative of the masses of kids who went to the Casino during the Northern Soul heyday from 1976-1981.
‘The characters are Maxine, Eugene, Danny and Suzanne” he says. “And the play is basically a love story between Maxine and Eugene, how they meet, end up living together. But Eugene is into drugs – amphetamines, selling them, whatever – and this comes between them as it did with many people during that period. Whereas Danny and Suzanne is a relationship that never happens. So, there’s no Hollywood ending here.
“There’s also a relationship between Danny and Eugene because Eugene sees Danny dancing and wants him to teach him. And Danny is more my story. I was an apprentice at 16 and went to Wigan as a release from all that. Which is what Wigan was for a lot of people. We lived a mundane life but the Wigan Casino, with those all night parties playing Northern Soul, was like paradise at the weekends.”
In this sense, Once Upon A Time In Wigan is “a celebration, a tribute and a memory.” It’s certainly all that for Paul.
“When I say I went into an apprenticeship that’s because people where I come from weren’t told there was even a possibility of going to university,” he elaborates. “So I became an engineer. But you have to see that story – and all the other stories in the play – as set in Thatcher’s Britain, which was a terrible time in our history. When Wigan closed in ’81 she was closing everything down so even if I’d stayed in engineering I wouldn’t have had a job anyway. For people of my generation, ’80, ’81 was a bizarre period, because everything seemed to be closing down because of Thatcher. Yet Wigan stayed open for eight years and gave us a centre for life and when it closed down a lot of people had to reassess their lives.”
In Once Upon A Time In Wigan, the music “not only sits at the centre of the play it drives the narrative forward,” explains Paul.
Which means plenty of Norther Soul tracks which were popular 20 years ago even if most originally came from the ’60s and ’70s. (And maybe even ’50s in the case of Fats Domino.)
Incidentally, if you attend this show at the Helix you will also gain free admission to The Soul Place, the venue’s own soul club, which will be playing Northern Soul before and after the performance. How’s that for a night out!

Once Upon A Time In Wigan opens at the Helix on February 4