Guest Blog: Book Writer Jeanie O’Hare and Pentabus Artistic Director Elle While on MAKE GOOD: THE POST OFFICE SCANDAL

Pentabus Artistic Director Elle While and book writer Jeanie O’Hare discuss the creation of Make Good: The Post Office Scandal, a new musical that is currently on a 25-venue tour of the UK, produced by Pentabus and New Perspectives.

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Jeanie: I remember hearing on the radio about the Post Office Scandal in 2013 and it was abundantly clear from that interview that the sub-postmasters were innocent. I remember feeling heart-sick, crestfallen that good people were being sent to prison when they were clearly innocent. It was a terrible event happening in the heart of our communities. I was working in New York, so I went back to my job, and when I moved back to the UK in 2019, it still wasn't dealt with. So in early 2021 I pitched it to Elle.

Elle: We spent a couple of days in our space in Shropshire with actors, musicians, myself and Jeanie and we invited a community choir, the Rockspring Choir. In a lovely full circle, they were the community choir for our first show, three and a half years later at the Ludlow Assembly Rooms.

We tried some scenes out and tried some singing out. We didn't have songs at that point, so we asked Rockspring to bring along their own repertoire that they already knew, and we changed some lyrics and messed around with them.

And just from that we started to go - there’s really something in this.

Jeanie: It felt like it needed to be very open hearted. And that open heartedness needed to be connected to the form. So there is a kind of a breaking of the fourth wall. And in a practical way, our community choir sing two numbers at the top, they sing our final number, and they have some lines to deliver. So we were inviting people who were coming to the story afresh each evening to contribute their skills, their concern and their love for this, for the story, and for the sub-postmasters.

Elle: It’s been organic in that there was no master plan to get to this point. I don't think we knew in our heads what it was going to look or feel like, apart from the soul of it. Jeanie was always really clear that Make Good would be the heart and soul of the postmasters’ story, not about the big guns who destroyed them.

Jeanie: While the Inquiry was going on, it didn't feel like there was a good way to get involved in the story of the villains and the corruption and the dubious practice of the Post Office lawyers.

It made more sense to for us to focus on really what's going on in the home. You know, when the door gets shut and someone who's always been a good person is now being threatened with going to prison for being a thief.

Those are the moments that Jim Fortune and Maimuna Memon, our two composers, have beautifully found the melodic expression of those private fragments. That's where I think the show is at its most effective and affecting, that's where audiences can go through the story with the postmasters, and actually you never forget how a musical makes you feel.

There’s a long, long way to go in this story in the UK, so it's also about trying to find a way to make sure that the story stays alive imaginatively.

Elle: Our creative team started to fill out very organically. Jeanie had already started conversations with Maimuna as well as Jim, because we were so clear that we wanted a South Asian voice in the creative team, because the victims of the scandal have so disproportionately been of South Asian heritage.

Jeanie: As well as the research, interviews and conversations, we've had two development moments where we invited sub-postmasters to watch what we had so far, partly so they could help us make sure the story was accurate, but also to make sure that we were pitching it emotionally at the right level. We set it up so they could leave the room and go next door if the work was too triggering, because reliving this stuff is so difficult.

But we found that they wanted to stay and that there's a real catharsis in going through it and understanding that it can be captured objectively. There’s something about the sharing of it that they really appreciated.

Elle: It's really moving watching audiences watch it, because you realise they're not just responding to enjoying a show, they’re responding to people's real lives. We're at the stage now where we can feel grateful for that response and feel relieved. But I think it's easy to quickly forget the level of anxiety, because it's such a massive undertaking, and you’ve got to get it right if you're telling those stories. So yeah, I've gone from feeling incredibly anxious about it to feeling very moved in a few days.

Jeanie: One final thing is it that there is surprise that this story would be told in musical form. But I think that the musical form is endlessly elastic, and actually can be applied to darkness and to tragedy and to all kinds of stories where what you're after is the internal struggles and griefs of a human being.

Make Good: The Post Office Scandal is touring the UK until 1 December

Jeanie O'Hare image credit: Joan Marcus

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