Shraddha | Oberon Books

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Winner of 2010 Meyer-Whitworth Award

“It’s thrilling to encounter a playwright who first of all takes the time thoroughly to research an unseen corner of British culture, and then enters so passionately and creatively into the challenges of bringing that story to the stage. Shraddha displays some breath-taking writing and a vivid theatrical imagination; it’s the kind of play that makes you hungry to know what the writer will produce next.” 

Edward Kemp, Meyer-Whitworth Award judge

Introduction

To the free spirit. May it rise up, whatever happens.

I had just finished a production of my play, The Method, at The Oval House Upstairs and was feeling a bit depressed. I thought I should pull myself together so started to play with ideas for my next project. A loud voice in my head shouted GYPSIES, GYPSIES, GYPSIES! Maybe it was because I had been fascinated by the Romany heather sellers as a child. Or because I wanted to hear the Romany side of the story. Or because I felt like an outsider too, that I naively followed that voice, thinking I would go and find some English Romany people and chat to them. It took months before I found anyone who would talk to me or help me with my research. Many Romany people don't trust the gorgers (non-gypsies) and they can be difficult to find.

The sites Gypsies and Travellers live on are often located under fly-overs, or on the edges of motorways or factories. They haven't chosen to live in these places. By law Gypsies and Travellers are only legally allowed to stop on these sites 'designated' by the local council. There are not enough designated sites provided, so many Travellers are forced to stop on land illegally (being moved on every few days) or to buy their own land (very expensive and difficult to get planning permission to live there) or to give up their traditional way of life and go into a house.

I asked everyone I had ever met if they knew any Romany people. A friend of a friend happened to be managing a young Romany girl singer and she and her mum graciously allowed me onto their site and into their spotlessly clean trailer in Hertfordshire over a few afternoons. I started to get an insight into their misunderstood culture and found opportunities to meet more of these warm-heated, hard-working and skilful people. I travelled to Appleby Horse Fair with Nathan who taught me some of the Romany language. I met Charlie in London who had grown up in poverty travelling with a horse-drawn vardo but, over time, made enough money to buy a house then knock it down in order to build a better one and to get around the laws that prevented his family and friends pulling up on his land in their trailers. I met Cliff in Norfolk while he was recovering from an eviction from his own land and the dispersion of his whole family. The first time I met Ann on her site in Essex she had just received a letter with 'Follow the smell' written under her designated site address. Another girl's wedding reception had been cancelled by the proprietors of the hall they had booked after he had found out that they were Travellers.

I met more Gypsies and I read books about their history and the constant persecution they have endured over the centuries. And I became increasingly enraged at the way this continues in modern England and Europe. It is quite acceptable in Romania for villagers to take torches into the Romany ghettos and burn their huts for sport. Here it still seems commonly acceptable to call Gypsies 'dirty, thieving pikeys'.

What struck me above all about the Romany people I met wasn't just their dignity, pride and survival skill but their strength of pure spirit. Something us gorgers seem to have lost. I sometimes felt the Romanies I met were the true humans. The rest of us mere automatons in a corporate reality.

As I attempted to start writing Shraddha, after absorbing all this research, I heard about generations of Romany families being evicted from their site of forty years to make way for the 2012 Olympics. Shraddha isn't a factual account of that eviction or what happened to those families. I wanted to use the Olympic eviction as a metaphor for the precarious existence our law-laden society has forced Romanies and Travellers to live. And, of course, Shraddha is a love story. Make of it what you will ...

Available from Amazon.

Written by Natasha Langridge