DIVA caught up with the creators of Gwenda’s Garage to discover the background to this fabulous new musical taking theatres by storm this autumn
BY NICKY HALLETT, IMAGES BY ROS WALLEN, VIDEO BY PIP FILMS
Is it possible to feel two different things, equally strongly, about the 1980s?
“It were a right miserable time.”
“It were proper fun.”
These are words of two characters in our new musical, Gwenda’s Garage, premiering in Sheffield and London this October. For one of the women, it was a time of personal misery: a lesbian mother under Section 28. For another, it was uplifting, marked by new-found sexual consciousness.
Gwenda’s Garage is set in a real place: a lesbian-run car-repair workshop established in Sheffield in 1985 by three mechanics (Ros Wollen, Ros Wall and Annette Williams), unable to find work in a male-dominated world. Our musical draws on interviews with women involved with the garage, fictionalised to reflect wider political contexts – for Gwenda’s was always about more than car repairs. Named after Gwenda Stewart, a record-breaking racing driver in the 20s and 30s, it became a focus for women’s education and activism.
For us, the research process was both salutary and uplifting. While embracing this queer story, told in our own back yard, we were taken back to 1980’s grimness – mass unemployment, the aftermath of the miners’ and steelworkers’ strikes, with the Tory government systematically seeking to dismantle progressive policy and what they perceived as power bases of the “loony left” – particularly trade unions and municipal councils.
Equally we were reminded of positive effects: Women Against Pit Closures, Greenham Women’s Peace camp – waves of energy for action against injustice, racism and misogyny, and the staunch socialist resistance of Sheffield itself, dubbed by supporters and antagonists alike as The People’s Republic of South Yorkshire.
Three words formed a refrain in our interviews: feminism, friendship and fun. Gwenda’s Garage had to be a musical to celebrate that – and a fourth f-word runs through our script and songs: family.
Faced with the Tory government’s Section 28 prohibition of local councils “promoting homosexuality as a pretended family relationship” our characters reveal the real-ness and resilience of lesbian family life in all its shapes and sizes. We follow them as they endure the cruelty of bigotry and rise on the wings of collectivism and mutual care, debating the intricacies of feminism: falling out while watching each other’s backs.
Our next salutary moment was realising the 1980s were 40 years ago which made us officially heritage, underlined by funding by the hugely supportive Historic England that enabled two sell-out standing-ovation script-in-hand performances in 2023.
More alarmingly, words we heard in the 1980s are chillingly familiar again today as the reactionary right lays claim to ideas of family and nation (“I am protecting the children” as one of our Tory characters says) – ideas that invoke nostalgia for an exclusionary space that never actually existed: its own ‘pretend’ that vilifies and seeks to divide.
Gwenda’s Garage celebrates resilience and hope for a better world. Its cry for collective action is never more urgent.
Now funded by the Arts Council, join our exuberant call to arms, filled with humour, heart and hope at Sheffield’s Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse (15 – 25 October) and London’s Southwark Playhouse (30 October – 29 November).
Gwenda’s Garage the Musical: Script by Nicky Hallett, Music by Val Regan, Lyrics by Val Regan in collaboration with Nicky Hallett.
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