Knocked For Six : End of the Line

Writer, poet, playwright and regular Open contributor Sabrina Mahfouz shares her riotous experience of creating End of the Line for the recent London Festival Fringe.

Every August thousands of people embark on their artistic/alcoholic pilgrimage to Edinburgh Festival. It is great, no doubt about that. But it’s also expensive and far from London. So this year, theLondon Festival Fringe was set up as an alternative for those who couldn’t afford or didn’t want to brave the fierce fringe wind all that way up north.

Me and seven writers who had just completed the Royal Court’s Young Writer’s Programme this time last year, decided to stay huddled close through the winter months and write a show for this new and dangerous sounding London Festival Fringe. What we came up with was a series of short, small, sharp-tongued plays and vignettes that were all set on the Underground and featured about as many dodgy characters as you would find on a last train to Wathamstow on a Friday night.

We thought we might do it in a park (I know, we were high on Fruit Gums); on an actual tube carriage; in someone’s flat. We were not really jumping for the stars. But then we read our scripts a little closer and realised we could do more with it. We imaginatively titled it End of the Line and got little brothers and guilty parents to start designing, printing and pimping for what they could.

And so began the crazy days of cakes and halal steaks and the Phoenix Barand the London Festival Fringe and a theme of ‘underground’ which became The Underground and Soho Theatre and The Westminster Prize and a few lies and deadlines and castings at Cuckoo Club and thugs we knew, some we didn’t (but wouldn’t mind if we did) and The Roadtrip Bar and great acting and spreadsheets and Natalie Ibu lending a directorial hand and a unanimous love of London and so importantly, IdeasTap Group Funding.

The end of The End came after we’d ushered (maybe pushed, a bit) 170 people to squash themselves up into a rush-hour like make-shift tube carriage over  four days; it came after we’d managed to negotiate theatre idiosyncrasies into an East London nightclub basement (We love The Workshop) for a week whilst surviving on pizzas and chips from the upstairs deli; after we’d left tickets hidden in random objects all over the tube (and people who found them came!); after some of London’s most respected theatres and organisations (The Royal Court, The Bush Theatre, Art on the Underground, Arts Council) were represented in the audience and giving us feedback. Some of us backed beers and tequilas to mark the event and others took the jukebox over with classic 90s tracks from the likes of Jon Bon Jovi, just to remind ourselves that despite our sell-out success, we definitely were still not very cool.

We couldn’t quite believe it. Somehow the writers which make up Knocked For Six -  Mediah Ahmed, Zia Ahmed, Rumi Begum, Triska Hamid, Zainab Hasan, Fenar Mohammed-Ali, Amber Mun and myself all managed to stay silent for long enough to write and rewrite our pieces – with changes being made right up until the last night. Some of us had to stay vocal – with Zia, Fenar and Zainab taking roles in the production and me on the mic making tube announcements. They and the rest of the cast – Alexander Aplerku, David Ajao, Lydia Rose Bewley, Gabriella Schmidt, Rhoda Ofori-Attah, Lelo Majozi and Jim Tanner – made magic with our words and all deserve to be superstars. It is definitely a work in progress and something we all look forward to seeing again in some form or another in the future. But for now, I will shut up and let some others tell it like it is:

‘I thought the concept was great…there were moments of moving insight as well as poignancy’
Clare McQuillan, The Royal Court

‘I really enjoyed it…all brilliant’
Emma Love, The Independent

‘Despite its title, End of the Line is clearly just the beginning for this team of young writers. I look forward to whatever destination they take us towards.’
Scott Matthewman, The Stage