Voice Of The Voiceless: Lee Bainbridge Brings Brighton '84 Home

Ahead of Brighton '84's arrival at Harrogate Theatre, King Brilliant co-founder Lee Bainbridge talks to Group Editor Andrew Palmer about class, comedy and a writing partnership a decade in the making.

Mention the Brighton bombing and most people picture the same thing: Margaret Thatcher, the Grand Hotel, a nation holding its breath. Lee Bainbridge wants you to think of someone else entirely. "What about the other people who were there who were just living their normal lives?" he asks, and it is that question, not the explosion itself, that sits at the heart of Brighton '84, the new King Brilliant Theatre Company production he brings to Harrogate Theatre this September. It is a question that has shaped the best part of Bainbridge's career.

Bainbridge's own story began a long way from any hotel room. Growing up in Castleford, drama was compulsory for one lesson a week in his first years of secondary school, and he loved it more than almost anything else on the timetable. But when the time came to choose subjects, acting simply wasn't on his radar. "I believed that it wasn't possible for someone like me to be an actor," he says. He chose PE and geography instead, and set his sights on the Royal Marines.

It was in the Marines, oddly enough, that the idea refused to die. Impressions and skits during downtime earned him a standing joke among his unit that he ought to be on the telly. Eventually he took it seriously enough to leave the forces and, within four days, had enrolled on a BTEC at Wakefield College. He is candid that the Marines gave him more than a change of career: the discipline and self-belief instilled at sixteen, he says, still tell him there is nothing he cannot do "within reason."

The real conversion, though, came from watching a play. Bainbridge saw the writer Philip Stokes' My Filthy Hunt while at Wakefield and describes it, without embarrassment, as life-changing. Brighton '84 is his tenth collaboration with Stokes, a partnership Bainbridge likens, with a self-deprecating laugh, to Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan — "not that I'm comparing myself to Brando." What draws him to Stokes' writing, he says, is its refusal to flatter its own characters: flawed, sometimes grotesque, always human, and grounded in a gritty northern reality even when the staging turns theatrical, as when Heroin(e) for Breakfast personifies its subject as Marilyn Monroe. It is, in Bainbridge's phrase, a way of giving "voice to the voiceless" — and it is a phrase that runs through everything he does.

That philosophy is also what took him from jobbing actor to company founder. Bainbridge grew frustrated watching regional theatres talk about community outreach without, in his view, living up to it, and decided he would rather build his own platform than wait by the phone for someone else's job offer. King Brilliant Theatre Company was born as a home for working-class creatives shut out of drama school and university by cost, beginning with a tenth-anniversary revival of Heroin(e) for Breakfast that took the company to Edinburgh and the Jersey Arts Centre. Covid nearly ended it there, but Harrogate Theatre stepped in, and the resulting production, Shellshocked, went on to Adelaide Fringe, a sell-out Edinburgh run and an off-Broadway transfer in New York. Fittingly, its life ends this September with a crossing to New York aboard the Queen Mary — theatre's answer to arriving in style.

Brighton '84 reunites Bainbridge with his Shellshocked co-star Jack Stokes — Philip's son, whom Bainbridge has known since the boy was six years old and kicking a football about on set. Watching him grow into "a really talented young actor" who has never set foot in drama school is, Bainbridge admits, something close to emotional. In the new play he plays Barry, opposite Jack Stokes' Johnny, and the pairing is deliberately mischievous: Johnny is public school-educated and comfortably off, yet the more socialist of the two; Barry is working-class and northern, yet the more conservative. Given that 1984 was also the year of the miners' strike, the swap is no accident.

Nor, insists Bainbridge, is the play interested in easy political point-scoring. Its ambitions are quieter and, he suggests, more lasting: giving space to people history tends to leave out of the frame and letting them argue about the world as it affects them rather than as it appears on the news. The times may have changed, he says, but the hotbed issues never really go away. Nearly forty years on, he sees the same ugly discourse, the same sense of being unheard, and the same people feeling forgotten.

Structurally, the play offers nowhere to hide: 75 minutes in a single hotel room, played in real time, without blackout or interval. For Bainbridge that is both the challenge and the appeal, keeping the audience locked into the room with Barry and Johnny from the first line to the last. He is equally clear that darkness needs its counterweight. Comedy, he says, drawing an unexpected parallel with his time in the Marines, is a coping mechanism for the things you have no choice but to witness — and he hopes audiences leave Brighton '84 having laughed as much as they have caught their breath.

The production arrives in Harrogate with a small army of collaborators behind it: alongside King Brilliant, the show is co-produced by Richard Jordan Productions, 412 and the Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield, a reflection, Bainbridge says, of just how financially precarious new theatre-making has become without shared risk. Harrogate itself, though, is where his heart lies. He has history with the venue through David Bown's Stand, and with the city through regular visits with the Sheffield company Reform; when it came to choosing a home for King Brilliant, he says there was only ever one place that matched what he wanted the company to stand for as a genuine presence in its community.

It brings him back, inevitably, to the voiceless — and to the audience he never had in mind when he first watched a play change his life. His message to a working-class teenager in Castleford today, sitting through the one drama lesson a week that might be all that is on offer, is simple enough to sound almost too plain: don't be afraid. There are still not enough avenues for people from backgrounds like his, he admits, and the arts still has work to do on that score. But if the pull is there, he says, follow it — "that sounds so cheesy, doesn't it? But genuinely, if you've got a passion for something, don't let anybody tell you that you can't do it." Coming from a man who once thought acting wasn't for someone like him, it doesn't sound cheesy at all. It sounds like proof.



Brighton '84 runs at Harrogate Theatre from Thursday 3 to Saturday 5 September. For more information and to book tickets, click here