Make Good musical ‘reveals the heartache’

The tales of the folks caught up in the Post Office scandal impressed one among the landmark TV reveals of current years.

Now, after the success of ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office, a brand new drama is telling extra of the human tales behind the scandal another way – as a theatre musical.

The present, referred to as Make Good, follows characters based mostly on a few of the sub-postmasters who had been wrongly convicted utilizing proof from defective pc software program.

Telling the story as a musical is “the best way of accessing the heartache and the torment and the isolation” of the victims, co-writer Jeanie O’Hare advised BBC News.

O’Hare started engaged on Make Good lengthy earlier than the ITV drama aired in January. She has spoken to actual Post Office staff who had been caught up in one among the UK’s greatest ever miscarriages of justice.

“The big tension in the Post Office story is that these people are trying to hold on to the fact that they know they are good people, and they’ve been pillars of the community, but the world is now screaming at them that they are liars and thieves,” she stated.

“They gave their hearts and souls to us as communities and are still doing so. And we decided to believe a bit of tech rather than believe the living, breathing, amazing human beings who had been holding our communities together forever.”

O’Hare, who labored for the Royal Shakespeare Company for seven years and was chair of playwriting at Yale School of Drama, has written the script for Make Good.

The songs have been composed by Olivier Award-nominated Jim Fortune.

“They get inside the soul of the characters and tell the emotional journey of those characters,” he stated.

Make Good is being carried out in theatres and village halls throughout England by long-running touring theatre firms Pentabus and New Perspectives to mark each firms’ fiftieth anniversaries.

The tour launched on Saturday in Ludlow, Shropshire, the place Pentabus is predicated.

A distinct group choir has been recruited in each location to carry out with the forged.

“They will vary in number and they will vary in tone, but it will all be fabulous,” Fortune stated.

Before the tour started, some actual sub-postmasters went to look at the present in rehearsals.

“They’ve been amazing, they’ve come in, and we’ve sung at them, and they’ve been generous,” Fortune stated.

“It must have been the weirdest experience for them. But they’ve been quite extraordinary.”

O’Hare added: “We set aside a room at the side where they could just sort of disappear and just have a cup of tea if they needed to.

“But really, they stayed with us all the manner by, and their response was mainly that the distinction between what we’re doing and what ITV drama was doing was that we’re genuinely breaking their hearts and capturing the heartache of it.”

Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted when faulty Horizon accounting software made it look as though money was missing from branches.

Many went to prison for false accounting and theft, and many were financially ruined.

O’Hare spoke to some of them in the course of her research, and gathered material from the Post Office Inquiry.

Unlike Mr Bates vs the Post Office, her characters aren’t directly based on specific people, but are closely inspired by what the real individuals went through.

One of those she spoke to was Chris Trousdale, who was just 19 when he was convicted for accounting irregularities at his post office in the Yorkshire village of Lealholm. He had his conviction overturned in 2020.

“One factor I stated to all of them (the forged and crew) once I went to look at the rehearsals was that the sub-postmasters should not valuable about the story. They simply need it to be finished justice to,” Mr Trousdale said.

“And the cause they need it to be finished justice to is as a result of they do not need it to occur to anybody else.”

Seeing actors perform some things he had told the playwright was “cathartic”, he said.

“When I went to look at the rehearsals, I used to be a bit – doubtful is the fallacious phrase – however a bit to see how a musical would work with it,” he stated.

“We’ve seen a earlier play, after which clearly we have seen the drama on ITV, and also you assume, effectively, how is that this going to be dealt with? And I used to be completely blown away.

“One thing that this will do, which the TV drama didn’t, with the singing, will portray that inner agony, which really comes across.”

Another play on the topic, referred to as Glitch, opened in Reading in June.

In January, Mr Bates vs the Post Office was watched by 10 million folks, and has gained prizes from the Royal Television Society, National Television Awards and Broadcasting Press Guild.

It additionally put the concern on the entrance pages and at the high of the political agenda, with the former authorities saying laws to quash convictions in February.

“I think I got to a position where I thought the drama is not having that kind of impact any more,” O’Hare stated.

“But actually, they really did have an impact. They really changed the conversation in the House of Commons. That drama impacted the law, and it felt really encouraging. But I also knew that we were doing something very different.

“In a village corridor with a group choir, the expertise is wrapped round you, and it is not about revealing issues. It’s really about attempting to heal issues and attempting to reconnect us all to the story, and reconnect all of us to one another.”

Make Good is on tour till 1 December.