Calling Barnsley Book Launch
By Polly Turner.
‘Calling Barnsley’ is a love letter to a northern ex-mining town, told in the dramatised words of its inhabitants. And it will bring a tear to your eye and make you laugh out loud. It is made up of short pieces that sound like conversations between friends or tall stories told down the pub or at family gatherings. Words from people you feel you already know.
These are intensely local accounts, full of spirit of place but I think their appeal would go far wider than this, as at heart they are stories about people – funny memories, sad memories, hope, drama, love. From the boy who got comically stuck down a pipe while out playing, to the woman who attended the wrong funeral, to the LGBTQ love story behind Darfield Museum, to a recollection by Dickie Bird (and by the way, his statue in the centre of Barnsley is holding up his first finger, not flipping the town off!) and reflections on childhood, solidarity and community seen through union banners or the march in Goldthorpe celebrating the death of Margaret Thatcher, to a story about a dressmaker who reminded me of my own Auntie, all of life is here.
Commissioned by Storying Barnsley and developed by the award-winning Barnsley-based theatre company LUNG, the work comes after two years of interviews and listening to local voices, trawling old stories in the Barnsley Chronicle, working with Barnsley College and Barnsley Civic. Recordings of the pieces were displayed in a specially made phonebox installation at Barnsley Civic during Spring 2025, and this is now set to tour around the Barnsley areas where the stories were originally collected.
Founded in 2014, LUNG is a campaign-led arts charity, with an expressed aim to make hidden voices heard, and they’ve certainly done that here. They are Company in Residence with the National Theatre and partners with The Lowry in Salford, Manchester, and have toured work around theatres and schools across the country. I think it would be great to see a produced version of this work do a similar tour.
The book ‘Calling Barnsley’ by Helen Monks and Matt Woodhead (£10.99, Faber) launched at an event at The Civic on 7th November, and on the night it was clear to see Helen and Matt’s enthusiasm about Barnsley and their commitment to staying true to the source material, and they spoke about how they hoped it would inspire future storytellers.
The pieces would also make great monologues for auditions as they are all presented in a compact, personal style and showcase a range of emotions and a Northern voice often under-represented in audition pieces. The book (Faber, £10.99) is now generally available – in fact I’ve already picked up another copy as a Christmas present for my father-in-law, who many years ago taught for a while in Barnsley(But don’t tell him!). Helen and Matt are available for bookshop events, features and radio interviews, and serial rights are available from Faber. For publicity enquiries, please contact matt@lungtheatre.co.uk and lily.levinson@faber.co.uk
