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When I moved to Southport with my family in 2022, I didn’t expect this once genteel, now fading seaside town to make the national headlines.
But events a couple of years later – especially the night of furious and ugly rioting on 30 July 2024 – set off a chain reaction across the country that we’re still coming to terms with and some of us are desperate to understand. Listening to what was happening just a few minutes down the road, with my two young daughters asleep in the room next to me, was a profoundly altering experience, not least in how it changed the course, if not the content, of my research.
I’ve written extensively about the circus in Ireland since the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Probably because of that famous Juvenalian metaphor, panem et circenses, I’ve always been particularly interested in coincidences of the circus with politics, whether in explicitly satirical performances within the ring or elaborate rhetorical feats beyond it. I’m also fascinated by what the circus reveals to us about society, running, as it does in the popular consciousness, as a cross-current to so many of our accepted norms and conventions. That fascination drove an article I wrote not long ago about the role of the Belfast Community Circus School and Festival of Fools in the regeneration of Belfast city centre since 1985. From a research perspective, I was, then, very intrigued to see that the centrepiece of a major programme of regenerative cultural activity planned for Southport in 2026 was the Big Top Festival: a celebration, according to its producers, of the tradition of world-class circus performance in the town that is as old as the town itself.
My research has always refused to sit still in archives and libraries, as much as I love and depend upon them. There have always been practical aspects to both the gathering and the sharing of what matters to me. Almost 20 years ago, when I was still an undergraduate, I set up the production company Sidelong Glance to create what I think of as research-led theatre and film. The company’s most enduring production is a piece called Wild Laughter: a kind of biography in literary and historical collage of my great grandfather, the nineteenth-century stage clown Albert James, created with my sister and fellow academic Dr Rosie Lavan (Trinity College Dublin). In the decade since its first performance, Wild Laughter had always been something designed predominantly for academic audiences: a piece that demonstrated how archival material might be brought to life and explored differently through its embodiment in theatre. When director Jen Heyes and I won a commission to transform the show earlier this year into Wild Laughter: Fun on the Prom for the much wider and more diverse Big Top Festival audience, Albert discovered a new lease of life. His purpose became less self-reflexive and more socially aware, as he took the people who gathered to watch and listen to him on a journey through the history of clowning, comedy, and the seaside in contemporary Britain. It was impossible for him as a character and me as his creator not to acknowledge the decline of the resort in which we found ourselves, but it was just as inevitable that we would see in the release and relief that humour brings something quite brilliant – perhaps something akin to what those who established the Belfast Community Circus had seen in their city in the mid-1980s.
Albert has hung up his beret for the meantime. But the business of thinking through how clowning and comedy might function in what James Joyce called ‘schemes for social regeneration’ continues. Next month, I’ll be premiering a new work funded by the Economic and Social Research Council called Best Practice, which I’ve created in collaboration with Lecoq-trained performer Seamus Lavan and one of Southport’s leading cultural venues, The Engine Room. Originally subtitled ‘A Pantomime for Policymakers’, Best Practice is really a show for anyone who’s ever tried – and quite possibly failed – to make something work. It tells the story of efforts to revive the Wayfarers Arcade, one of the gems of Southport’s Lord Street, and asks the audience to design through serious play a blueprint for the town’s future. It would be wonderful to have your help in that enterprise.
Best Practice will take place on Friday, 19 June 2026, at the Engine Room in Southport. For further information about and to book free tickets visit: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/best-practice-a-new-theatre-work-at-the-engine-room-tickets-1987129701429