‘Shakers’ Collaboration Aimed at the Working Class

“Bouncers” was his baby. “Shakers” is theirs. The former was John Godber’s electric, award-winning paean to working-class machismo in an English nightclub. (It ran for months at the Tiffany Theater in 1986 and 1987.) The latter, by Godber and Jane Thornton, both from Britain, is a cheeky, fast-paced romp with four waitresses in a London pub. It opened at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in March and runs through Sunday.

“Sometimes I write very poorly for women,” said Godber, who with Thornton was enjoying a brief holiday in Los Angeles last week. “On other occasions, I write very well for women--the working-class women I know: my sister, my aunties, my mother, my grandmother, the girls I taught at school. The women we were writing about in ‘Shakers’ I had only observed. I didn’t have them under my skin.”

Thornton brought to the project not only an independent sensibility but a backlog of female experiences. Each wrote half the scenes, Thornton did the final polishing. Yet she hasn’t always received her share of the credit: “Obviously, John is the name --although I am getting more well known. But it’s his fame that attracts people to the theater. When some people have written about ‘Shakers,’ they’ve said, ‘It’s a new play by John Godber,’ and put ‘He collaborated with Jane Thornton’ in brackets.”

A couple since 1981, this marks the first time they have functioned as co-writers. Formerly a drama teacher, Godber, 32, has run the Hull Truck Traveling Theatre since 1984 in Kingston upon Hull, an industrial and port city in Northern England. There, he’s mounted many of his own works, including the mining-themed “Happy Jack” and “September in the Rain.” His former student, Thornton, 26, divides her time between writing (she also has a play about the mining community--with female protagonists) and acting.

It was her frustration at not finding good acting roles that inspired “Shakers.” Explained Godber: “When we saw how little exciting work actresses were getting in England, anything that was alive . . . . Our plays are about acting, as well as what they’re about. Actresses weren’t accustomed to that kind of (quick-change) physicality: ‘I’m a woman’ / ‘Now I’m a man’ / ‘Now I’m a woman.’ It’s being naked on the stage--and it’s exhilarating.”

Some would disagree. In spite of its huge local success, “Bouncers” was critically chastised for celebrating “style over content,” a charge that’s also been leveled at “Shakers.”

Godber’s response: “For me, naturalism in the theater is utter, utter death. I’d rather be dead than watch a piece of naturalism. Telly (television) can do that. I want to go to the theater and see something that makes me work, makes my imagination work. But it seems that the minute you veer away from (conventional) naturalism, people start to get worried.”

Especially some American audiences. “When we wrote ‘Shakers,’ ” Thornton said, “I never imagined it would come here. The first priority was to write it for the theater in Hull, for that particular audience. The people that John’s trying to reach are a working-class audience that don’t normally go to the theater. So you can’t expect them to sit and look at one scene for a long time; they’d be bored. They want to recognize themselves, they want to have a good time.”

Does this mean pandering to a mass mentality?

“Absolutely not,” said Godber. “If we were pandering we’d do it in a naturalistic setting, which is what most writers do. You have to go into your imagination to write another style than naturalism.” He is similarly dismissive of theater’s “cultural” obligations: “Chekhov is no more culture than these four girls working in a cocktail bar. Books, literature--I’m not saying they’re bad; I’ve done that scene. But there is a subterranean culture people need to be made aware of: the strength of their own culture.”

That’s what he cares about.

“It only matters a certain amount that ‘Bouncers’ did well here and that ‘Shakers’ is now here,” Godber said. “Honestly. What matters is that I run a 200-seat theater in a very deprived area of Northern England and I’m bringing people in who think that theater is a cultural barrier, that the word theater is a turnoff. At the moment, we’re doing ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ ” He shook his head.

“I’m not sure we’ve done the right homework. You can get people in Hull to see a John Godber play, but when you stage William Shakespeare. . . .”

Still, he remains hopeful.

“What we’re trying to do is not put up barriers. If theater is to survive, it cannot be a club, where the same people see the same things. We want people to use our theater like a library (his space is open every day), as a public service, accessible to a large audience. What we’re saying is that popular is not necessarily lowbrow. But popular can be accessible. And it can be challenging.”