Theatre / tom marshman
After almost 30 years, Tom Marshman revisits the Weston-super-Mare of his youth
Tom Marshman has long held a creative preoccupation with storytelling, spanning performance art, theatre, spoken word and lip synch to inhabit the voices of the characters that have figured large in his life.
In recent shows, he has explored grief, friendship, and the LGBTQ+ community of Old Market, ‘Bristol’s Gay Village’ – where he still lives, archiving the lives of the personalities that have coloured the area.
For his new solo show Brothers Across The Decades, coming to The Wardrobe Theatre on September 6-9, Marshman revisits the Weston-super-Mare of his youth, after nearly 30 years away.
is needed now More than ever
Weaving together coming-of-age comedy, nostalgia, history and memoir, he draws on a formative time studying drama at Weston college, against a background peppered with intergenerational dialogue between LGBTQ+ people in the town, and the devastating emergence of the AIDS crisis.
Why did you decide the time was right to revisit this part of your youth?
“Doing my BTEC in performing arts in Weston-super-Mare back in the 90s was a period of time that I think I had dismissed as a bit frivolous, all jazz hands and Lycra, but when I came across some old photos some complicated emotions came flooding back. I remembered how free I felt at first but also how fearful I was about growing up as a gay man at the time. The stigma about my sexuality was heavy on my young person’s shoulders and the shadow of HIV and AIDS was palpable.
“I was also curious to see where all my college mates and teachers were now, so the show allowed me to do a bit of nosing around into the lives of people I used to know.”
How did the show originate?
“During lockdown I wrote a short story about my experience doing the BTEC in Weston. I read it out over zoom, and on the other end of that call was Fiona Matthews, Creative Director of Culture Weston, and Megan Clarke Bagnall, Lead Artist. They asked me if I was interested in reworking it into a short performance for when the theatres started to reopen.
“I presented it first in 2021 at the Quarry in Weston, working alongside the Covid regulations of the time. It was outside, in a beautiful location. This felt very special because, coming after lockdown, it was the first time I had performed live in a very long time.
“The following year I showed it again at the Grand Atlantic hotel in Weston, which has a very faded glamour. And then, as an experiment to see if this piece could work outside of the local context, I performed it at Chelsea Theatre on London’s famous Kings Road. This was the place I could think of that I felt was most unlike Weston-super-Mare! But it seemed to work well, which gave me the confidence to perform it more and to tour it like I might any other show.”
Have there been any emotional or practical challenges to putting this together? Has it been a healing experience?
“Emotionally I feel quite divided. There is something that feels desperately sad when I think back to that time. There was so much freedom and possibility in the world, and sometimes when you look back it can bring a real sadness when you think you could have made more of it. This is mostly internal for me and these thoughts and moments are fleeting. Within the show these thoughts and moments are also beautiful, they feel so pure! There was an innocence in those times that I tried hard to connect to when writing the show.
“During the process of making the show and putting it together again I was reunited with my college friends and teachers. I interviewed them but also had to respect and understand that some of them didn’t want to get involved, so there is some anonymous content, and others simply reminded me of some hilarious things that we used to get up to. I have loved revisiting my past in this way; it has made me want to make more shows about key points in my life.”
Tom Marshman: Brothers Across The Decades (age guidance 15+) is at The Wardrobe Theatre on September 6-9 at 7.30pm (content warning: the show includes references to suicide and terminal illness). Tickets are available at www.thewardrobetheatre.com.
All photos: Paul Blakemore
Listen to the latest Bristol24/7 Behind the Headlines podcast:
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
