By Anila Dhami
MICHELLE Payne, wrote, produced and acted in her play ‘Orchid’ on Monday 24th August at Moors Bar, part of this year’s Camden Fringe, and saw her first play sell-out, performing to a full house.
The 24-year-old has spent nearly one year writing ‘Orchid’, a story about “The Fall” which was a cataclysmic event that scorched the Earth’s surface two decades ago.
The capital’s remaining survivors exist in the vast tunnels and stations of the London Underground Tube Network.
Despite the apparent desolation above them, a young girl named Orchid, played by Michelle, who has known nothing but darkness, dreams of seeing the sun.
She is also desperate to see and feel the rain, but having just found shelter from the storm that hit London that night, I wanted to tell her she wasn’t missing much! But this is how real, authentic and relatable the play was.
As the storyline progressed, we discovered more about the lives of those underground and how various gangs resided at different stations, including King’s Cross, Holborn and Westminster. Having just jumped off of the underground, you could really imagine it.
But you did not need to use your imagine too much due to the excellent utilisation of the miniscule stage space that even harboured the Bar’s toilets; that is how small it was.
The actors and actresses used torches to show one another’s faces which made it all that more authentic. This was their survival technique, and the contrast of the electric torch-light made Orchid’s need to see the sunlight even more susceptible.
The gangs living underground, sticking together and fighting over resources to survive, alluded to the great and widening class divide in society today. Orchid’s want to see over-ground, the deaths of those remaining underground, and the fear of the other characters of what lies above the tunnel also reminded me of the migrants travelling from Calais, where some fear travelling overseas for a new life, some face death in the process, and there is a struggle for survival.
Michelle explained “I feel like we all get so bogged down with the monotony of day to day life, making money, waiting for holidays, that we forget to actually live.
I wanted my audience to question this and hope and faith and spirituality, and most importantly the pursuit of happiness, and what it means to be happy.”
Addressing class divide in theatre itself is an issue Michelle tries to address through the art of acting and writing.
“Growing up in a working-middle class family in Essex I often felt that theatre was an exclusive thing for the upper classes. I would really love to bring more working class people to theatre.
I feel that theatre is an excellent tool to express your opinions and provoke debate, so that we learn to question and discuss.”
I was nearly in tears as a beautiful, well-crafted soliloquy left us on tenterhooks as Orchid ventured out of the tunnel alone. Whether she survived or not is the question. But after an interview with Michelle, I would like to think she did.
