‘The Mill – City of Dreams’ tells the stories of the labourers, many of them hopeful immigrants, who found themselves working in the Bradford wool mills in 1945 where, over the years, their disparate lives became woven together as tightly as the wool they spun.
The play is deliberately fractured and meandering, a reflection of how real lives are really lived, and relates the journeys of the characters as they travel from hope to reality.
The audience, moving from room to room, are exhilarated from the start by the artful chaos of the piece, catching characters out of the corners of their eyes and picking up dialogue from the echoes.
However the coup de grace is the venue itself – Drummonds Mill, which sits glowering on the landscape but which, once re-animated by the play, becomes its own ghost, alive with the past. Cavernous, shadow-heavy halls stage distant tableaux of characters’ lives in Italy, Pakistan and the Ukraine; pillar-spliced workrooms show the characters, now in Bradford, working, dancing, dreaming; backrooms hidden behind dark double doors open up to reveal characters whose soliloquies are punctuated by factory announcements made on the mill’s original tannoys.
Every space is used ingeniously. As we turn to ascend stairs, for example, we catch glimpses of lonely girls pressed up against windows phoning home while elsewhere stretches of corridor become makeshift museums studded with weaving paraphernalia.
In an exhilarating moment halfway through the play the building rouses itself magnificently and actually performs like an old ham alongside the actors when, during a scene set in a snooker hall, balls are rolled over the uneven floor to create the eerily accurate sound of spattering rain and are suddenly accompanied by the groans of creaking timber beams as the mill is buffeted by the wind outside. It is an incredible commingling of artifice and reality and seems to sum up the night.
There was real depth, detail and integrity to this project. From the woollen bales we could sit on to the charming security guard who kept secret the real significance of certain adverts we saw on entering, everything was done with an integrity and flair that made for a deeply satisfying night.
‘City of Dreams’, is a powerful celebration of the extraordinary nature of ordinary lives and was, on every level, a labour of love created by the marvellous Freedom Studios with help from the local community.