It is October 2015. I am sat opposite Sam Steiner in his kitchen in Manchester, attempting (for the fourth, fifth time) to write this; mercifully, it feels like this time I might actually get somewhere. We have spent the last two days taking Lemons to schools in Leeds and Newcastle, and if you’re ever wondering how to begin writing about a thing you’ve spent a year making, I can highly recommend putting it in front of a tumult of Year 9–13s and then letting them grill you for an hour.
Talking with students as they weighed up their thoughts on the daily word limit at the heart of the play – its effect on the characters’ relationship, its political implications, its function as metaphor – it was impossible not to be reminded of the giddy sense of possibility with which Sam and I first talked about the idea in the summer of 2014. What it’s easy to forget in hindsight is that many of those early conversations were characterised as much by healthy disagreement as by mutual excitement: one of us convinced this would be a play about a couple and how they communicate, the other set on a piece about censorship and oppression.
It is satisfying, then, to speak with audiences who have found those dual impulses intact; who have accepted the work on its twin terms as both political parable and love story. A year on from the genesis of the project, we’ve found ourselves with a play which unabashedly thrives on its contrasts. First dates rub against fierce polemics, and wittily observed pillow talk jostles for space with heated debate; the writing negotiating tonal shifts in such a way as to persistently ask audiences to engage both their hearts and heads.
So much of this spirit of contrast is contained in the manner in which the play was made: Sam’s compelling, singular voice responding to a profoundly generous process of collaboration. Beth and Euan have been on board from the very beginning, and Bernadette and Oliver have them – and their brave, bright, tireless commitment to exploring these characters – at the core of their DNA.
In one sense, it is odd to think of Lemons being set down in print as a published volume, in that it has always felt less like a fixed entity than a living, breathing reflection of the work we do as a company. But more than that, it is ineffably exciting: for Sam, whose writing deserves to be read often and widely, and for Walrus, for whom this book serves as a testament to the warm and winding road which we have travelled so far.
Ed Franklin, Director