This is an adapted version of a piece I wrote for The Times on 19 January. Following Joanna Carrick’s funeral on Friday, it seems right to put it up here, because theatre pioneers and projects like this deserve remembering and honouring.
A light has goneout in Ipswich. The death of Joanna Carrick, at 58 after a short illness, threw sadness over Suffolk’s unassuming county town. Her little theatre stood dark; the shock hit friends, professional colleagues, her community companies and the Christmas audiences for a scholarly and hilarious Alice in Wonderland done with aerialism and rabbit-jazz.////
The sudden loss of the founder and creative director of Red Rose Chain is grievous, briefly blotting out for some of us the racket of international and domestic chaos. The only healing reflection is that in a not-quite-broken Britain, this unique professional-and-community company survived decades and launched several serious theatre careers while staying viscerally close to its town’s historic and modern identity. Raised in theatre from childhood (her father Antony Carrick) Joanna was a skilled playwright, and as a director kept tight, high standards of work whether with professional casts or her teenage, disabled or marginalized local companies. That rigour showed, and mattered.
I came across it first ten years ago, when with Heritage Lottery money the Avenue studio theatre at the Tudor Gyppeswyk Hall opened with her play PROGRESS. It’s set during the 1561 visit of Elizabeth I to Ipswich, and despite knowing that her Anne Boleyn play had been performed at the Tower of London I expected a mere local diversion. I was shamefully wrong: like Carrick’s other Reformation plays it is a fiercely humane portrait of neighbours scarred by family memories of persecution and burnings, knowing who recanted and who betrayed. Impossible to watch without empathy for 21c global terrors; impossible, too, not to feel how a local audience gains dignity when its history is given back so vividly. The depth of Carrick’s research and Shakespearian background also had the advantage that she spoke, as it were, fluent Tudor: in her period plays the dialogue never falls into awkwardly effortful “prithee, my lord” language, but lives.
Maybe they also live more vividly because of input from the idiosyncratic nature of Red Rose Chain, whether portraying 17c history or anything from a local Zeppelin crash in 1915 to the Victorian development of lawnmowers. Experience with youth theatre inspired her to explore what might emerge, personally and artistically, from the contribution of people with lives far from comfortable middle-class artiness. Alongside her young professional casts and sometimes graduating to perform alongside them, three companies formed. ACT is for adults with disabilities, addictions or other vulnerabilities: she worked alongside victims of the notorious 2006 Ipswich murders of sex-workers. Then there are “Chainers” : inclusive without audition from age 10 to late teens and beyond, and “Gold Chainers”, children with learning disabilities. All studied and workshopped company themes, from 17c witch-hunts to wartime England or the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. Some with mental difficulties spoke for the first time. And into this odd, fertile little community flowed other insights and lines from narrowed lives: local prison inmates. Some she mentored have, after release, worked alongside the company; their writing was notably strong during lockdown when Red Rose Chain continued online and assembled individual green-screen videos for a full Twelfth Night.
The words “inclusivity and diversity” can get cheapened into tick-boxery, but it was a revelation to watch Red Rose Chain’s ecology, from the simplest Gold- Chainer shows to summer spectaculars. I stood back all I could as a critic, despite a growing friendship with Joanna, her husband David Newborn, son Ted and the team. It was fascinating to watch the symbiosis as even the most marginalized fed into serious professional work: as if in music a hesitant piping was picked up and melted into full orchestra. The atmosphere was uncombative: the name comes from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis where the goddess foils a “direful god of war” by binding him in a chain of red roses.
Sitting by Joanna’s hospice bed with her husband and son, the sadness was a little dimmed by knowing that her last year was so triumphant. There was a cracking Pinocchio, now sought by another theatre, and a remarkable outdoor Hamlet at the Sutton Hoo ship-burial site, young operators working a 20ft Ghost directed by international-quality puppetteers. Earlier, Carrick’s latest play THE UNGODLY, about the 17c Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, had a London run at the Southwark Playhouse and a short exhilarating New York season in “Brits on Broadway”. Her best moment was when a group of black women passionately connected it to their lives and “Roe v Wade, women manipulated into worrying about men’s rights…it made me get into perspective why we actually do this job, which is to make people have emotions, think, and see the world differently. To feel that it communicated across the cultural divide was wonderful, just what we needed.”
They surely did: the small team had hastily been scavenging faux-17c props and building the set on a shoestring. As director, she walked in Central Park with Vincent Moisy – cast as the Witchfinder – to work on his coming role as Hamlet, but only after he had finished hammering together a 17c farm kitchen. She eschewed hierarchy: everyone at times worked front of house, bar or backstage. If there was ever an exemplar of believing in drama as a gift of humanity, it’s been this little outfit.
Of course not all theatre can be like this; of course there is hierarchy and hard commercial pressure, and some community work is merely therapeutic or “let ’em come on as the chorus”, without the electric charge of artistry and scholarship that Carrick gave her unregarded hometown. But it happened. People will remember and its spirit survive. The community work continued, and at her packed, extraordinary funeral service members professional and amateur sang the songs she wrote for her productions over the years. Her husband, son, cast and team carry on: this summer, as usual, their major Shakespeare production will be outdoors at Sutton Hoo. It’ll be the Twelfth Night she directed.
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