profile
LOUISE OSBORN
Writer, director and all-round theatre star
Louise Osborn talks to Heather Arnold
about how she turned her book of scraps,
scribbles and images into a show about the
residents of a lodging house in Butetown.
“
It’s a little bit different from what you might
normally expect from going to the theatre,
because you don’t go to the theatre at all.”
Louise Osborn has been working in Welsh
theatre for over 30 years but for her latest family
show Maudie’s Rooms, she is abandoning the actual
theatre, and setting up stage in an old Customs And
Immigration house in Cardiff’s Butetown.
“You arrive at a bus stop,” Louise explains; “and you
come across a man who has abandoned his bride
and jumped on the nearest bus, finding himself at
this place.
“Gradually it dawn on him that the place
is familiar, he’s been summoned back
to the place of his childhood; an old
lodging house.”
A few years ago Louise started
collecting snippets of her family’s
history: she collected stories,
ideas and emotions, and began
to distil them in the form of a
scrapbook. The little black books
opens up and reveals sketches of
characters, frecky photographs and words
scribbled round at a variety of angles.
It’s a beautiful memento of the creative process.
Louise’s creativity, however, didn’t come from
nowhere; a huge inspiration for the show was the
childhood of her husband.
“When my husband was a little boy he lived in a
great big house in Maida Vale. His mum had been a
refugee from Berlin and she’d come on one of the last
children’s transports.
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She had a fairly difficult time as she was a single
parent and had two children. She managed to get
the leasehold on this big old house which was full
of lodgers. There was an old lady across the road
called Maudie who cleaned the spare rooms. My
husband spent a lot of time with Maudie, hanging on
her apron strings; she always had doughnuts in her
pockets.”
As the phrase goes truth can often be stranger than
fiction, and Maudie isn’t the only real life character
to make her way into the production:
“There was a gentleman in this house who lived
in a room full of newspapers, he hoarded
them. He was a lord, or a sir, and
he’d get up every morning, put on
a bowler hat and go out with a
briefcase – but he had no job.
“I’d always been really compelled
by the idea of this house,” Louise
beams as she is clearly a woman
who is still enthralled and excited by
the stories she is telling, “I loved the
idea of this place where there were secret
worlds inside different rooms.”
Flicking through her book, Louise describes some of the
secrets and characters lurking behind each door. There
is still a hoarder hiding in his forest of newspapers,
a hermaphrodite who is building a husband in her
laboratory, and a dastardly villain in the form of the
spectacularly named Sir Titus Spicketts.
“The building was like a character in itself,” explains
Louise; “for lots of people, going in the house was a
big thing.”
For a production set in the foreground of the changing
face of Britain during the 20th century, it is almost
poetic that is being shown in a former Customs House.
“It seemed almost serendipitous that these two
things came together,” says Louise, “it’s absolutely
redolent that place.”
Although Maudie’s Room is being described as a
family show Louise is positive it isn’t just for kids, as
it’s magic and fanaticism doesn’t take away from the
more dark and serious issues it addresses:
“When we did the production development, a lot of
the adult audience came out very wet-eyed because
it had resonance with them. There’s a misconception
that children don’t live in the adult world, the same
one we do. Children are vigilant, they’re observing,
watching. A friend of mine brought her five-year-old
to see the show when it was in development, and her
little girl acted out scenes from the play for a long time
afterwards. It had just captured her emotion.”
Tailored for all but sacrificing nothing Louise’s
Maudie’s Room seems to have taken the personal
history of her loved ones, as well as the public history
of modern Britain, and stuffed all its characters and
magic into one old building in Butetown.
I will admit I have some of my own stories that start
at a bus stop, but can tell you now that none of them
are as captivating, enchanting and touching as
Maudie’s Room promises to be.
Maudie’s Rooms, Bute Place, Cardiff,
Fri 11-Sat 26 Apr. Tickets: £8/£28
family ticket. Info: 029 2064 6900
www.shermancymru.co.uk