Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is a playwright Lance Woodman, who has written for Radio 4 and is a theatre tour guide for the Royal Shakespeare Company.  Lance was born in Hereford but moved quite a bit while young and now lives in Stratford-upon-Avon. He has undertaken research into his family tree (Lance’s great uncle was my maternal grandfather), including most recently the 1921 census. He talks about how this has been a source of stories for his playwriting, and we learn about the rabbit holes he has found himself going down. Lance talks about how it’s a working class history that is not widely covered, involving no dukes, kings or earls. He found an example of a family member, for example, who was deported due to Poor Law legislation. He reflects on how in such a scenario existence is tenuous and that very few people broke out of the cycle until more recent times. We discuss whether and how Lance uses the raw materials of such research as data for writing plays, and we discover that he uses ghosts as a dram