Maimuna Memon - actor, musician, songwriter
Wildcard's resident composer wants people to stop putting labels on musical theatre.
Hiya…
Hope you are having a good weekend and coping okay with everything that is going on at the moment. On Tuesday, it will be one whole year since theatres first shut down. That’s a very depressing thought - I often think about the aggregate hours of laughter that have been lost - but you could look at it another way. If theatres do re-open in May, then we are 86% of the way through. 14% to go. Nearly there, in other words. On the home stretch.
You’ll notice that this issue of The Crush Bar is arriving a couple of days late. Apologies if you were left disoriented by its absence from your inbox on Friday morning. But anyway, you’re here now. Welcome. Thanks for coming. If you haven’t subscribed already, then please smash the button below…
The reason the newsletter is a bit late is because I couldn’t do the interview for it until Friday afternoon. I was keen to chat to Maimuna Memon ahead of her new streamed show opening in Sheffield, but we couldn’t sort out a time until Friday afternoon, meaning I had to bump the email back two days. I’m sure you’ll agree it was worth the wait.
You’ll find our chat - about gig-theatre/musicals and how unhelpful those labels can be, about Wildcard Theatre and their awesome show Electrolyte, and about Muna’s forthcoming EP - below, followed by a few bits and bobs. Before that, though, it would be awesome if you could give The Crush Bar a wee share. See you at the bottom!
Interview: Maimuna Memon
During the third weekend of July in 2019, I spent a happy few days at Latitude, the eclectic arts and music festival nestled in the sun-soaked slopes of Suffolk’s Henham Park. The highlight of the weekend wasn’t Baxter Dury on the main stage, or Tom Allen in the comedy arena – although both were great – and it definitely wasn’t Sunday’s headliner Lana Del Rey, who arrived on stage with the infuriating opener “Hello, London!”
No, it was Electrolyte, the gig-theatre show from Wildcard Theatre, which played the sweatbox Film and Music tent on the Sunday afternoon. It was the perfect show – a guileful story of grief, told through a free-flowing amalgamation of spoken-word and energetic electronica – in the perfect place, at the perfect time. And, for composer and performer, the multi-talented Maimuna Memon, it was the start of something special.
“I have always loved writing music and writing lyrics,” she says, “But Electrolyte proved to me that I could do it properly. Professionally. It was a massive turning point for me in a lot of ways. I learned a lot about the creative process of making a show based around music. I’m so proud of that show, and the work we all did on it.”
“I think in our hearts we knew it was a good show, but good shows can get really lost in Edinburgh…”
Electrolyte had premiered the previous year, when it had made something of a splash at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe. It arrived in Scotland with plenty of support – from The Watermill Theatre, from Les Enfant Terribles, from Theatr Clwyd, from Pleasance, among others – but Memon says the show’s success was anything but certain.
“I think in our hearts we knew it was a good show, but good shows can get really lost in Edinburgh, so we decided to go out and busk on the streets every day,” says Memon. “That was our way of getting an audience in. We got moved on so many times, but it seemed to work because we started selling out.
“We got some co-producers, we booked a UK tour, we went to Latitude, and then we brought it back to Edinburgh the following year. We had some exciting dates booked for 2020, too, before coronavirus shut that down.”
Electrolyte’s success isn’t just significant for Memon – more of that in a moment. It is also a significant show for the growing genre of gig-theatre. Along with other hits like Middle Child Theatre’s All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Arinzé Kene’s Misty, it is part of a movement proving that musical theatre doesn’t have to mean what it has traditionally meant – big-budget, West End-style productions that generally follow a formula.
“We are seeing a lot more hybrids, a lot more plays with music, a lot more experimentation. And that’s amazing…”
“Musicals cost a lot of money, so they come with a lot of risk, so producers often want them to be tried and tested,” says Memon. “I get that. But things are changing. They are further ahead of us in America – that’s why they have shows like Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen – but things are definitely changing here now, too. We are seeing a lot more hybrids, a lot more plays with music, a lot more experimentation. And that’s amazing.”
“People always want to put things in boxes,” she continues. “Is it a musical? Is it a play? What is it? And the problem with those labels is that there are connotations attached to them that can be so unhelpful. It can alienate people. So I think it is better if you just don’t answer that question. It is what it is.”
Memon has a warm, Lancashire accent. She was born in Preston in 1992, the daughter of a Pakistani father and an Irish mother. She moved around a lot as a child – she spent three years in Australia in her late teens, which she describes as “a pretty shit time when I really lost myself” – but music has always been a part of her life.
“My Irish family are all incredibly musical,” she says. “My mum is an incredible fiddle player, and my grandad was an amazing accordion player. I’ve got three brothers and all of us are musicians. I started learning the violin when I was young, and then I taught myself the guitar and the piano and the drums. Music has always been a huge part of my life. I think I wrote my first song when I was eight and wanted to be Avril Lavigne.”
Memon found acting through her high school drama department, and when she moved back to Britain – by herself, age 18 – she was faced with a choice: acting or music? She opted for acting, but it was at Oxford School of Drama, where she met James Meteyard, artistic director of Wildcard, that she realised she could do both. By the time she graduated, she says, she was acting and writing music in tandem.
Memon had appeared in shows before Electrolyte – she was in the 2016 London staging of Lazarus, Enda Walsh and David Bowie’s musical, an experience she describes as “raw” and “very emotional”, coming so soon after Bowie’s death; and she was in the second staging of Jesus Christ Superstar at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 2017 – but it was after Electrolyte that she started to find regular work as a composer and a performer.
Much of it has been in collaboration with the playwright Chris Bush. She starred in Bush’s musical The Assassination of Katie Hopkins in 2018, then in her musical Standing At The Sky’s Edge, based on the Richard Hawley album of the same name, in 2019. Shortly before Christmas, she wrote the music for Bush and Rebecca Frecknall’s devised show Nine Lessons And Carols at the Almeida Theatre, and she is about to appear in Bush’s play-with-music The Band Plays On at Sheffield Crucible.
“We are writing another musical together at the moment, too,” says Memon, when asked why she has such a fruitful creative relationship with Bush. “We really respect and support each other a lot. We have a really collaborative, honest way of working with each other, which involves a lot of patience and which I really appreciate. I think she is brilliant.”
“When you have a diverse group of people in a room, it balances out personalities, it balances out egos, it balances out perspectives…”
Memon found collaborating with Bush and Frecknall on Nine Lessons And Carols a particularly enjoyable creative experience – partly, she says, because of the gender balance in the room.
“So often in this industry, you enter a room and it is dominated by a male presence,” she says. “Rebecca made sure that wasn’t the case, and it made a real difference. It was so refreshing. When you have a diverse group of people in a room, it balances out personalities, it balances out egos, it balances out perspectives. It balances out everything, and that is so important when you are trying to be creative.”
The Band Plays On, meanwhile, which is available to stream from Monday, is “an ode to Sheffield”, according to Memon, featuring songs from some of the city’s most famous musicians – Arctic Monkeys, Def Leppard, Moloko, Jarvis Cocker, Slow Club, and more.
“It’s quite gig-like,” adds Memon. “And it is that kind of weird theatre-film hybrid that made me shit my pants when I first started doing it, but which I now find incredibly liberating.”
All things considered, the last year has proved quite productive for Memon. Nine Lessons And Carols managed a few live performances before the last lockdown and Jesus Christ Superstar, which Memon returned to last summer, managed a whole run in Regent’s Park, making Memon one of a handful of people who have performed to in-person audiences not once, but twice in the last twelve months.
“I feel really lucky to have been able to act in front of an audience again,” she says. “It was amazing last summer in Regent’s Park. I think Jesus Christ Superstar is one of the best scores of all time. It’s got everything - rock, jazz, progressive folk. And to be able to sing that with a live band again was out of this world. It was bliss. The only negative was that I had hay fever.”
And, on top of everything else, Memon has spent some time in the recording studio: her debut EP is coming out later this year. It is the same songs she is currently collaborating on with Bush for their yet-to-be-announced musical, but she wants to release it as an independent album as well. What are her influences as a musician? “Regina Spektor, Joni Mitchell, Bon Iver.” Was she annoyed, as I was, when Bon Iver collaborated with Taylor Swift? “Not really, but I can see why you might be.”
“They are songs that work on stage, but they are also songs in their own right,” she says of her forthcoming EP. “They can be both. That’s the music I try to write. It could be for a show. It could be for a gig. It could be for a record. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”
“There’s a famous quote: “All art aspires to the condition of music”,” she continues. “I can’t remember who said it, but I fully believe it. Music transcends every other art form because everyone can relate to it. It’s about feeling rather than words. It’s accessible. So, musical theatre should be the most accessible form of theatre, but it’s not. But it could be. That’s what I want to do.”
"If you want to get an idea of what I do…”
Listen to the album Begin To Hope by Regina Spektor.
Follow Wildcard Theatre on Twitter and Instagram, and check out our website.
Watch The Band Plays On, streaming from Sheffield Theatres this coming Monday for two weeks.
Bits and bobs, shouts and murmurs…
If you are after a bit more from ME, then there’s a few things that have been published since last time: this long-read about pub-theatres and their struggles through the pandemic, this article on & Juliet and the day the West End shut down, this chat with Morgan Lloyd Malcolm about Emilia, and this chat with Shane Richie about Scalextric.
Mark Strong’s Desert Island Discs is great, particularly the bit about meeting Arthur Miller in the house from The Sound of Music. I love Mark Strong. Remember A View From The Bridge? What a show that was.
I love articles that expose the unseen conveyor belts that move actors and creatives around the performing arts industry. This NYT piece by Matt Wolf, set within the context of the Golden Globes, does just that, making clear the pipeline that escorts talent from the British stage to Hollywood film sets.
Sign this petition to save the V&A’s Theatre and Performance department! It’s tantalisingly close to 15,000 signatures. To find out more about what’s happening, read this.
There’s a great interview with poet and theatre-maker Luke Wright in this episode of Front Row. His new collection - The Feel-Good Movie Of The Year - is published on Monday and you can order it here. What I wouldn’t give to be watching him gig in a sweaty pub room somewhere.
The idea of big film stars returning to their regional theatre roots to help the industry recover post-Covid is gaining some traction. Samuel West talked about it on Front Row. Laura Collins-Hughes wrote about something similar for the New York Times. On balance, I think I like it. Part of me finds it a bit condescending, but a bigger part of me thinks that a) it would work, and b) it would be amazing to see Ralph Fiennes return to his native Ipswich to the New Wolsey’s Rock ‘n’ Roll panto.
That’s your lot…
Thanks for reading. Thanks for subscribing. Thanks for sharing. If you want to get in touch with me, just reply to this email.
The next issue will be along in a fortnight’s time. Well, actually a bit less than a fortnight seeing as this is going out a day later than normal. If you just can’t wait until then for more quality content, then give me a follow - @FergusMorgan on Twitter.
Right, I’m off to Homebase to by a lightbulb and a fuse - and I’m absolutely buzzing. Bye for now.
Fergus x