Loss, love and family are centre stage

Creative director Corey Campbell’s new play is shaped by tough times. By Joel Campbell

MIDLANDS-BORN PERFORMERS

Alexia McIntosh and Kieran HamiltonAmos join Belgrade Theatre creative director Corey Campbell in Big Aunty this month.

Directed and devised by Campbell, the production will also feature a seven-person ensemble choir, drawn from the talent in the local community.

Centring on the death of the family matriarch, a mum to some, a ‘second’ mum to others. Big Aunty’s funeral is back in Jamaica, where she returned some years ago.

Campbell told Lifestyle that losing 11 members of his family and close friends in 2022 left him feeling like he needed a way to process how he felt. He also knew that he wasn’t alone in how he felt and wanted to do something about it.

Grief

He explained: “The first thing I want to say is that the work comes from where we are at the moment personally.

“I’m going through a lot of grief and I felt as a global community and as a country we’ve been through some stuff that we’re trying to glaze over.

“I felt it was important to do a piece of work that gave space for an audience to really express themselves as well as seeing us do the graft on the stage.”

He added: “We do that through a Caribbean family, three estranged siblings that have to come together to bury mum.

“They have to come back together and get past the drama, past the things that split them apart in the first place and I think that’s where the positive side of the work is. Love brings us together, right? So, the matriarch passes away, there is always drama, who’s getting what in the will, who’s been left what. Mum’s in Jamaica, so we have to fly there and deal with the family and find out how they feel about us, that diasporic experience.

“So, the show looks at it from the lens of a Caribbean family

“It’s been real intense, we’re an intense group. There is a lot between us but we’re very different characters as people and we have had very different experiences, both in life and in our careers. Alexia and Kieran were in the original ‘Freeman’, so they were a part of building Strictly Arts Theatre’s first two shows and then they went and did their own thing.”

He added: “We lost our friends, and in mourning, we all came back together. Everybody is bringing their lived experience to the table and it’s all valuable.” but ultimately, it’s a family that has lost their matriarch and in burying their matriarch, they bury the hatchet and we look at how you reconcile and find love again through grief.”

Appointed Belgrade creative director in 2022, after holding the post of one of three co-artistic directors of the theatre for 2021 for Coventry’s City of Culture Year 2021, Campbell is also artistic director of Strictly Arts Theatre Company, formerly supported by the Belgrade’s Springboard talent development programme.

In Big Aunty, Campbell reconnects with Birmingham-born McIntosh who trained at the Birmingham School of Acting, and then went on to enjoy success as part of the Queedom playing Anna of Cleves in Six on the West End and then on UK tour.

Another friend and former colleague, Hamilton-Amos, was also born and raised in Birmingham and studied Applied Performance at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

Speaking on working with the two on the lead up to the production kicking off, Campbell said:

Produced by The Belgrade Theatre, directed and devised by Campbell with Sarah Githugu as assistant director, Big Aunty is the first home produced show of the 2023 spring season. And Campbell can’t wait.

Mourning

“As a devising artist, I often use theatre to help express who I am, but right now I see so many people in the same place as me. A lot of us have experienced loss over the last couple of years –it feels like the whole country is mourning,” he said.

“But as the character Big Aunty, might say, ‘There is no resurrection without death’, and I’m now reaching a place where I can experience some joy through the pain of loved ones lost.

“I hope Big Aunty will offer hope to people who are also on this journey forward, and that it will give all of us an opportunity to come together and share the experience in the unique way only theatre can provide – to laugh and cry, to heal and forgive. Live, laugh, love.”

Big Aunty is at The Belgrade’s B2 auditorium, Coventry, until May 6. Read the full interview at voice-online.co.uk