The Story of This City
Photography by Sophie Bradbury (@withsoph_)
By Nuna Sandy
Artistic Director of Company Three and Writer and Director of This City.
This City started off in 2024 as a co-created, 20 minute play about ambition, struggles and how to overcome them. When I asked the cast what connected all their different ambitions and passions, they said ‘That we live in London, and the city allows us the opportunity to pursue all our different ambitions.’
I suggested we call that earlier version of the show ‘Londoners’ but the majority of the cast paused. I asked them ‘do you call yourselves Londoners?’ and was met with a mixture of silence, a couple of yeses and lots of nos, despite the whole group being born and raised here.
We discussed why that was, and their answers were complicated, sad, beautiful and frustrating:
‘Me being welcomed here feels conditional.’
‘It depends who asks me, depending on the mood of the news, if it’s a form I'm filing, or if my friends ask. My answer changes.’
‘I’m grateful to live somewhere like this as I know different cultures and have friends from different places to me.’
‘The way I was raised at home and my language, food and culture is Algerian, so I live here but wouldn’t call myself a Londoner.’
‘I would say Sudanese, but I live here, so I have privileges they don’t have and I’m not going through what they are. I feel guilty to say that, I feel I have to call myself a Londoner.’
‘I’m proud to be Turkish, but I am also a Londoner and would call myself one.’
This opened up more conversations in our process. All the young people who didn’t call themselves Londoners shared stories of when they visited their parents' motherland and were called English or other colloquial terms. We discussed what non-Londoners noticed or identified in us when we left the city - things like our humour, fashion, the way we walk and our slang, and realised that we do have a London quality about us which they admitted and celebrated. We talked about diversity being a huge part of London’s personality and agreed that it was the thing we loved the most about living here.
I was born in Kenya and raised in London, and I realised that my own answer to ‘Are you a Londoner?’ was complicated too.
It was clear that these questions were personal and important to our young people, and like it was the right moment to be having these conversations with audiences too. It was also clear that if we and our young people were feeling this, that other young people in other places would be too. So we decided to make This City a flagship performance, and knew that it should be an Exchange Play, so we could collaborate with other brilliant companies working in other places across the country.
We set up the Cities Exchange with 20 Stories High in Liverpool, Beyond Face working in Plymouth and Exeter, and Zoo Co from Croydon, South London. We admired all these organisations, their approaches to making work and their commitment to equity, access and representation within their youth theatre work, and we felt we all (and our young people) could learn loads from working together.
In the Summer of 2024, the race riots happened across the UK and shook us all to the core. Our young people told us they were seeing an overwhelming amount of racism online and people attending riots in places we recognised. It felt the message was that Black and Brown people are not welcome in this country. And this message was coming from a lot more people that we all thought - we’re often told it’s the minority that feel this way, but these numbers made it feel like the majority.
Our annual residential fell during the second week of the riots in an area where a riot was planned. I had to reassure all parents that we were safe in a gated space - a message I never thought I would have to send in 2024. The replies were heavy to hold as the fear in the parents' messages was palpable.
On the night before the riot was planned in that area, we had an open mic night and a party where we all did the Candy dance. I looked around the room and saw the unity and joy between races, religions and genders. We brought everyone together and reminded them that Company Three is proof that we can all mix, work, create, argue, make up, dance and live together. It was both a beautiful and heavy moment for the staff.
When we got back to London and started talking about This City, we checked that the young people still wanted to explore these topics in the current climate - they said they were galvanised to.
Over the period of a year, we and the Cities Exchange partners created (and are still creating) our own plays based from the same starting point - cities - sharing practice and process along the way. At the start of this process, the artists and facilitators from each company went on an artist retreat to think about approaches into the topic, how to hold that space for our young people, and to learn more about each other. And then we went away on a residential with all our young companies - 30 young people in total, spending a weekend together in a woodland venue, having a bonfire, dancing together, and learning from other young people about their perspectives and approaches.
We used all the material gathered across this process, as well as in sessions over six months, to create the script for This City, and are excited to go into rehearsal for the show in July. We can’t wait to share it with you.