Buxton Opera House have interviewed me over what audiences can expect from Rank: A Tale from Paradise Heights. The interview also gives you a wider aspect on the world of Paradise Heights.
The full interview is below.
The full interview is below.
How would you describe the atmosphere of Paradise Heights, and what kind of journey is the audience in for in Rank?
In one word? Haunted.
But let's explore it a little more than that. There are times where the town feels suspended between reality and myth. The stories that are planted in the blood soaked soil here could echo down the centuries, becoming to the locals something as fabled and familiar as Greek Tragedy. It already has a cyclops doorman, a beast, a warhorse. It has a gangster that some think is the Devil himself. It has a gifted medium who some consider to be centuries old - where did she come from? A story involving a stolen baby in a jar. Kotto, a gangster gambler that could be almost reptilian, did he come from the sea? Only if you're superstitious. But then this is a very superstitious town. Like most fishing communities, it has its secrets, tragedies, great storms and lost souls whose ghostly cries are carried on the bitter, salty wind. But it is also grounded with real people and real problems, actions good or bad all have consequences - and Lisa MacGeehan's good intentions have lead to her drivers being attacked and beaten. A boycott on her business ordered by gangsters are stopping the few drivers she has left earning a living, and customers are too scared to order a taxi from her for fear of repercussions from the criminal community. She's under enormous pressure and her life is in real danger.
Rank is going to take the audience on a white knuckle ride on the night of Halloween in Paradise Heights. The Storm of the century I battering the town, strange vices are coming through in the intermittent frequencies of the cab and rank radios. Communications are down most of the time, and there's a full scale riot going on in the town, orchestrated by the MacGreavy crime family to keep the police busy; the MacGreavy target tonight is Lisa MacGeehan, Lucky Cabs owner. It's a journey into the dark night as a woman taxi rank owner finds herself battling the elements, vicious intimidation and there are supernatural entities about the town on their own business that night, but it all ties into the events taking place at Lucky Cabs, and more ominously to something horrific that took place that same week 20 years ago.
Can you tell us more about the characters?
The story is propelled by the journeys of brother and sister Lisa and Corny MacGeehan. Lisa took over her father's taxi business around 20 years ago. She's seen the sea side town crumbling down the years and the rise of organised crime in the area. She has a strong sense of responsibility, integrity and a great care for her drivers, and the wider community. Indirectly her family were destroyed by a horrific act that scared the town and that becomes clear in the story. Her mother and father are passed on. She is estranged from her brother, Corny, and there is bad blood between them.
Corny is an ex boxer, now struggling with Parkinson's disease and his mental health deteriorated in the wake of that incident 20 years ago, an incident that utterly destroyed him. He is prone to psychotic episodes, and burst of rage that get him into trouble, and he's not the fighter he was, he is completely broken physically. Despite all of this he uses his own dark humour to get himself through the days and nights. But like his sister he is scarred by that incident - and he has a long lasting grudge against Lisa who was forced to have him sectioned a few years back. But in turn he's worried about her, and events take a turn.
Her driver's Chris, Nick and Marek are still working at the rank, the only 3 drivers that have hung on under the intimidation from a crime family. Marek is East European, struggling a little with the English language but he is gregarious, strong and has a very protective instinct around Lisa, like Nick. But he is also worried tonight, folklore and superstition from the old country. Chris is angry, Lisa'a actions have placed all of them and her in a very dangerous situation, he's tired from working 17 hour days trying to feed his family and this boycott of the business has hit him hard financially. Nick, again protective of Lisa has his own problems and secrets that will also be revealed on this Halloween night.
Mickey and Eddie are two dangerous criminals that are set on stopping Lisa MacGeehan testifying against murderer Kyle MacGreavy, Eddie's brother. Mickey is the right hand man of Eddie's father. A long criminal background, a very dangerous and calculating man. And then there's Belial and Shirley. Shirley is the angel seen or sensed in all of the tales so far. She's from here, she died back in the sixties, it's easier to describe her as almost a celestial social worker. She has her own bright sense of humour and care, and Corny MacGeehan is her focus tonight, she's desperately trying to help him, she has a mission tonight. And then there's Belial. No one knows how long he has been around but essentially he's an angel of death. Like mismatched cops they are a partnership but one is light and the other very dark, two supernatural entities that flit through the tales.
The Paradise Heights series has an underlying supernatural theme; how did you go about weaving this into the fabric of the script when writing Rank?
I'd introduced Shirley in The Bench: A Tale from Paradise Heights, an angel looking after a the ghost of a man from Paradise Heights, a man that had died but not moved on. You see the early romance between these two in The Bench. It was a gamble introducing the supernatural there - I was worried audiences would not like this as they stood out from the other very real and grounded characters in that story. But to my delight audiences loved them. I wanted to do more with her and indeed with that ghost, how they met. Rank was born from that. Ghost stories, banshees, supernatural folklore have always fascinated me since childhood, indeed Lisa tells Nick a story from her past and that story is born from an experience I had as a child. Paradise Heights is rich in a folklore all its own, a place where beauty and decay exist side by side. A battered coastal fishing town wrapped in sea mist and secrets, it feels suspended somewhere between reality and folklore. The river that runs through it is more than geography — it’s almost a living presence, demanding souls, it carries memory, guilt, superstition and the ghosts of the past. There’s a constant sense that something is just beneath the surface: a whispered threat, an old sin, a spirit watching from the tide. The thread of the supernatural is strong in all the stories I tell, and building a forgotten seaside town, a dying pleasure land, a dead fishing industry all adds to that. Fishing communities are notoriously superstitious, and I wanted to make Paradise Heights a town with its own horrific folklore stretching back hundreds of years, witchcraft, sects, cliffs with a history of witches thrown from them, or widows of lost seamen doing the same - grief and horror haunt the town and its locations. It's a rich atmosphere and it will be becoming much richer in that - a major step forward comes in my next production The Haunting of Widow's Leap Farm. Widow's Leap being the cliffs overlooking the stormy seas of Paradise Heights. The streets are populated by damaged dreamers, hustlers, lost souls and survivors — people clinging to humour and community in a town slowly being swallowed by hardship, crime and myth. Life in Paradise Heights is hard, but it is never without poetry. Even at its darkest, there is warmth, wit and humanity.
Do I need to have seen the other plays in the series to enjoy this one?
Definitely not. They are all written as separate complete stories of their own, but they intertwine through the characters, locations and events from the past and present. You can jump onboard with any of the stories, watch them in any order. I want to appeal to new audiences along with the established fandom of the series, they have a real army of fans now all overt the UK.
What type of theatre-goer will find themselves most gripped by this story?
That's hard to answer. They are working class stories, addressing mature and difficult societal issues that affect every day life - and they are peppered with adult language to reflect our reality - over 18 age range for all of that. But at the same time they are supernatural stories. They have a very broad appeal across all age groups from 18 to 90, as we all know someone like every non-supernatural character in these stories, people can easily relate to them. They are all 'ordinary' people but living in extraordinary times - like we all are now with the world today. It is their actions, how they deal with it that creates an empathy. But all actions have consequences. How do they deal with those? That's where the drama is.
If you had to distil the essence of Rank into just three words, what would they be?
Compelling. Stormy. Haunted.
In one word? Haunted.
But let's explore it a little more than that. There are times where the town feels suspended between reality and myth. The stories that are planted in the blood soaked soil here could echo down the centuries, becoming to the locals something as fabled and familiar as Greek Tragedy. It already has a cyclops doorman, a beast, a warhorse. It has a gangster that some think is the Devil himself. It has a gifted medium who some consider to be centuries old - where did she come from? A story involving a stolen baby in a jar. Kotto, a gangster gambler that could be almost reptilian, did he come from the sea? Only if you're superstitious. But then this is a very superstitious town. Like most fishing communities, it has its secrets, tragedies, great storms and lost souls whose ghostly cries are carried on the bitter, salty wind. But it is also grounded with real people and real problems, actions good or bad all have consequences - and Lisa MacGeehan's good intentions have lead to her drivers being attacked and beaten. A boycott on her business ordered by gangsters are stopping the few drivers she has left earning a living, and customers are too scared to order a taxi from her for fear of repercussions from the criminal community. She's under enormous pressure and her life is in real danger.
Rank is going to take the audience on a white knuckle ride on the night of Halloween in Paradise Heights. The Storm of the century I battering the town, strange vices are coming through in the intermittent frequencies of the cab and rank radios. Communications are down most of the time, and there's a full scale riot going on in the town, orchestrated by the MacGreavy crime family to keep the police busy; the MacGreavy target tonight is Lisa MacGeehan, Lucky Cabs owner. It's a journey into the dark night as a woman taxi rank owner finds herself battling the elements, vicious intimidation and there are supernatural entities about the town on their own business that night, but it all ties into the events taking place at Lucky Cabs, and more ominously to something horrific that took place that same week 20 years ago.
Can you tell us more about the characters?
The story is propelled by the journeys of brother and sister Lisa and Corny MacGeehan. Lisa took over her father's taxi business around 20 years ago. She's seen the sea side town crumbling down the years and the rise of organised crime in the area. She has a strong sense of responsibility, integrity and a great care for her drivers, and the wider community. Indirectly her family were destroyed by a horrific act that scared the town and that becomes clear in the story. Her mother and father are passed on. She is estranged from her brother, Corny, and there is bad blood between them.
Corny is an ex boxer, now struggling with Parkinson's disease and his mental health deteriorated in the wake of that incident 20 years ago, an incident that utterly destroyed him. He is prone to psychotic episodes, and burst of rage that get him into trouble, and he's not the fighter he was, he is completely broken physically. Despite all of this he uses his own dark humour to get himself through the days and nights. But like his sister he is scarred by that incident - and he has a long lasting grudge against Lisa who was forced to have him sectioned a few years back. But in turn he's worried about her, and events take a turn.
Her driver's Chris, Nick and Marek are still working at the rank, the only 3 drivers that have hung on under the intimidation from a crime family. Marek is East European, struggling a little with the English language but he is gregarious, strong and has a very protective instinct around Lisa, like Nick. But he is also worried tonight, folklore and superstition from the old country. Chris is angry, Lisa'a actions have placed all of them and her in a very dangerous situation, he's tired from working 17 hour days trying to feed his family and this boycott of the business has hit him hard financially. Nick, again protective of Lisa has his own problems and secrets that will also be revealed on this Halloween night.
Mickey and Eddie are two dangerous criminals that are set on stopping Lisa MacGeehan testifying against murderer Kyle MacGreavy, Eddie's brother. Mickey is the right hand man of Eddie's father. A long criminal background, a very dangerous and calculating man. And then there's Belial and Shirley. Shirley is the angel seen or sensed in all of the tales so far. She's from here, she died back in the sixties, it's easier to describe her as almost a celestial social worker. She has her own bright sense of humour and care, and Corny MacGeehan is her focus tonight, she's desperately trying to help him, she has a mission tonight. And then there's Belial. No one knows how long he has been around but essentially he's an angel of death. Like mismatched cops they are a partnership but one is light and the other very dark, two supernatural entities that flit through the tales.
The Paradise Heights series has an underlying supernatural theme; how did you go about weaving this into the fabric of the script when writing Rank?
I'd introduced Shirley in The Bench: A Tale from Paradise Heights, an angel looking after a the ghost of a man from Paradise Heights, a man that had died but not moved on. You see the early romance between these two in The Bench. It was a gamble introducing the supernatural there - I was worried audiences would not like this as they stood out from the other very real and grounded characters in that story. But to my delight audiences loved them. I wanted to do more with her and indeed with that ghost, how they met. Rank was born from that. Ghost stories, banshees, supernatural folklore have always fascinated me since childhood, indeed Lisa tells Nick a story from her past and that story is born from an experience I had as a child. Paradise Heights is rich in a folklore all its own, a place where beauty and decay exist side by side. A battered coastal fishing town wrapped in sea mist and secrets, it feels suspended somewhere between reality and folklore. The river that runs through it is more than geography — it’s almost a living presence, demanding souls, it carries memory, guilt, superstition and the ghosts of the past. There’s a constant sense that something is just beneath the surface: a whispered threat, an old sin, a spirit watching from the tide. The thread of the supernatural is strong in all the stories I tell, and building a forgotten seaside town, a dying pleasure land, a dead fishing industry all adds to that. Fishing communities are notoriously superstitious, and I wanted to make Paradise Heights a town with its own horrific folklore stretching back hundreds of years, witchcraft, sects, cliffs with a history of witches thrown from them, or widows of lost seamen doing the same - grief and horror haunt the town and its locations. It's a rich atmosphere and it will be becoming much richer in that - a major step forward comes in my next production The Haunting of Widow's Leap Farm. Widow's Leap being the cliffs overlooking the stormy seas of Paradise Heights. The streets are populated by damaged dreamers, hustlers, lost souls and survivors — people clinging to humour and community in a town slowly being swallowed by hardship, crime and myth. Life in Paradise Heights is hard, but it is never without poetry. Even at its darkest, there is warmth, wit and humanity.
Do I need to have seen the other plays in the series to enjoy this one?
Definitely not. They are all written as separate complete stories of their own, but they intertwine through the characters, locations and events from the past and present. You can jump onboard with any of the stories, watch them in any order. I want to appeal to new audiences along with the established fandom of the series, they have a real army of fans now all overt the UK.
What type of theatre-goer will find themselves most gripped by this story?
That's hard to answer. They are working class stories, addressing mature and difficult societal issues that affect every day life - and they are peppered with adult language to reflect our reality - over 18 age range for all of that. But at the same time they are supernatural stories. They have a very broad appeal across all age groups from 18 to 90, as we all know someone like every non-supernatural character in these stories, people can easily relate to them. They are all 'ordinary' people but living in extraordinary times - like we all are now with the world today. It is their actions, how they deal with it that creates an empathy. But all actions have consequences. How do they deal with those? That's where the drama is.
If you had to distil the essence of Rank into just three words, what would they be?
Compelling. Stormy. Haunted.
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