The stories about life in Cornwall have flowed in: the hairdresser who gives everyone the same style because it copes best with the elements; the teacher who took a snowball in a cool box to the Isles of Scilly: the cat who follows the same routine as a country singing legend.
Over the last five years, scores of such tales have been painstakingly collected and blended into a new play called White Horse that reimagines a beloved book by one of the great chroniclers of south-west England, Michael Morpurgo.
Taking a break from rehearsals before the play’s opening in the old Cornish mining town of Redruth, the director Simon Harvey said themes that surfaced during the five-year story- gathering project included the importance of place, family, home and belonging – plus the enduring vitality of storytelling.
“It has been a fascinating project, a really interesting way of working,” he said. “More than 80 stories emerged – so much good material. We went into the communities and spent a few days there and started chatting to people and collecting stories.”
Some nuggets people told Harvey and his team find their way into the play, based on Morpurgo’s book The White Horse of Zennor and Other Stories, such as a woman who described an existential fear of the stark horizon after moving to north Cornwall from Manchester.
“There are bits like that that are peppered all the way through the script,” Harvey said. Other stories do not directly appear but are there in the subtext. “Some are more overt and others subtle, more of a feeling, a theme that is woven in.”
Morpurgo’s 1982 book features five stories centred on the village of Zennor, a place adored by artists, poets and mystics. “That was the first spot we visited,” said Harvey. “We did a story-gathering there. Invited people, laid on food, hired the village hall.” And the tales began to emerge.
Realising there was a wealth of Cornish stories to tap into, the theatre and film company behind the play and project, o-region, applied for money from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, a government programme that funds projects in places that can be hard to get to or are often bypassed – in this case, Bude on the north coast, the market town of Launceston, the Isles of Scilly, the Treneere estate in Penzance, one of the most deprived in England, and Redruth.
They found the hairdresser who gives all her clients the same “choppy cut” in Bude. The Scilly teacher said she took the snowball in a cool box to her pupils from the mainland because snowfall on the islands is so rare. A Treneere resident told them their cat went out mousing 9-5, so they named her Dolly Parton.
A rocker in her 90s regaled the researchers with an account of a punk band stripping off on stage in Launceston while someone mentioned the modern legend of north Cornwall surfer Peter “Vicko” Vickery inventing the surfboard leash in the 1950s using a washing line.
As well as enriching drafts of the White Horse script, many of the stories have been turned into pieces of prose or poetry by a team of writers and some are being released in a podcast series called From the Horse’s Mouth.
Harvey said: “There’s a lot in there about living in isolated places. We’ve learned a lot about these towns and villages and the people who live there. It’s been hugely rewarding.”
White Horse is being performed from 28 February to 8 March at the Regal Theatre in Redruth
