reviews of station stories
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Manchester Literature Festival Blog
Station Stories has arrived on Platform 5, and 10, and in fact the whole of Manchester Piccadilly, and the service is running three times a day over three days. The eagerly awaited site-specific literary project sees six North West-based writers (David Gaffney, Jenn Ashworth, Peter Wild, Tom Fletcher, Tom Jenks, pictured below, and Nicholas Royle, pictured above) each reading their self-penned tales of trainspotting and trauma in different locations around the concourse, trailed by a group of audience members in headphones.
“Station Stories will take people on a literary journey,” project creator David Gaffney had told me before the project got underway – and he’s not wrong. As you follow the lovely Diana or Mark around the transport hub to particular points to listen in live to the storyteller and soundscape, you do almost feel as much a traveller as the suited businessman dashing past you for a cab or the student dragging a wheelie case into the back of your ankle. The experience is very fluid and, even when you’re standing still for a story, the sense of movement continues as you track the performer wandering through the crowd, find yourself watching the passengers milling about or gaze at the trains rolling past.
I was privy to some of the project details in advance, but even for me there were surprises! David had hinted at littering, and one man almost confronted him about dropping cards on the floor, but was distracted by a phone call. Jenn Ashworth had mentioned to me that she had something special up her sleeve, and the minxy outfit she wears as her character certainly is something... All six writers use props and interact with people or place to create a performance and this, along with six vastly different writing styles and an ever-changing live soundtrack, results in a multi-layered event that is so much more than a standard reading.
The station building itself plays a huge part, and you notice architecture and structure from unusual angles and explore what are ordinarily non-spaces. Even the audience becomes inadvertently involved, and we were waved at, pointed at, stared at, even shrieked at. But despite drawing attention, the headphones make you feel cocooned somehow, as if you’re in a secret world with the writer, despite the other audience members. David was quite right when he told me: “Listening to a live performer in a public place in this way is like being linked directly into someone’s head. It is uniquely intimate and public.”
For Books' Sake
Station Stories rolls into Manchester Piccadilly at midday on Thursday, with three slots a day over three days. The eagerly awaited site-specific literary project sees six North West-based writers performing brand new tales of trains and tracks in various locations around the transport hub, each with its own set-up and each with a specially commissioned soundscape by Landcrash, aka musician Daniel Hopkins.
“Station Stories will take people on a literary journey,” says flash fiction author and novelist David Gaffney, who came up with the idea. “It will explore the day-to-day life of the station – its platforms, its workers, the journeys people take, the waiting, the encounters, the thrill, the loneliness, the joy, and it will express the peculiar, unique qualities of the station – a marginal, in-between world.”
Members of the audience will be given headphones and taken around the concourse to particular points to listen to the live broadcasts and play spot the storyteller. Some of the writers will be easily identified: one, Nicholas Royle, sits at the end of Platform 5 with a notebook and a flask of soup while reading The Lancashire Fusilier; another, Jenn Ashworth, is in a photo booth. The others will be less obvious, and members of the public may even interact with them – especially if provoked, for example by blatant littering.
“The unpredictability of it is something I found really attractive,” says Ashworth. “Each performance – and each of the pieces – is going to be quite different, yet as a whole they work together to give a flavour of the lives and stories that might be whirling around Piccadilly at any moment.”
Gaffney – whose flash fiction collection The Half-life Of Songs was recently longlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize – says all six stories “are unique to the station setting”.
As well as his contribution, Hidden Obvious Typical, there is Marble by horror author Tom Fletcher, Terminus by poet Tom Jenks, and three versions of The People Spotter (one for each of the three different performance times) by Bookmunch editor Peter Wild.
Of the six writers involved in the project, Ashworth – whose début A Kind Of Intimacy and newly published Cold Light are both critically-acclaimed – is the only woman, although she says the “difference between the stories is more to do with our versatility as writers and our own particular interests than our genders”. She does, however, concede: “My story, Soulless, is a playful reply to Anna Karenina - possibly the most famous woman ever to have done anything in a train station!”
Ashworth continues: “Station Stories is really exciting because it’s something very different to other projects I’ve been a part of – I decided to get involved because working with a sound team on a project that relies so much on the ambience of the space really tied into my interest in collaboration and writing that makes special use of setting.
“Working with the sound technician has made me view my performance and the train station itself in an entirely new way. I don’t think I’ll ever walk through the station again without thinking about the characters the six of us have invented – the voices we’re setting free there – and, after our performances, I don’t think the audience will either. They’re in for a treat!”
The Public Reviews
Station Stories is a new twist on immersive promenade theatre with a strong literary slant. A discreet public performance in a very public place.
Having booked your place on the Station Stories website, you arrive at the Station Stories stand inside the entrance of Piccadilly Station, where you are issued with a set of wireless headphones and a lanyard that identifies you as an audience member (in case you bump up against Network Rail officialdom). Once everyone is assembled – there were 28 in our group – after a short briefing you are led to a series of six locations around the station. In each location you are told a story, recounted by the author as they wander around the concourse or platform or wherever you happen to be. For the most part you are invisible to them. This is a kind of eavesdropping. You have to work out where they are and watch them as they linger or merge with the general traffic of the station. It’s also a kind of heightened people-watching, as if you have developed the uncanny ability to hear other people’s thoughts as they pass though this place of transit and waiting.
Even though you are in a group and gently marshalled from site to site, with the headphones on Station Stories is a surprisingly intimate experience that makes you feel slightly detached from the busy space you are inhabiting and the group you are with and yet strangely connected to random strangers within that space. The stories tell of love and loss and obsession and grief, all connected in some way with being in or travelling through Piccadilly. Station Stories has a cinematic quality as you watch a real-life wide-screen vista with a soundtrack playing in your head. Original music by sound artist Daniel Hopkins blended with samples and found sounds mixed live by Hopkins and sound engineer Rory McGarrigle is moodily atmospheric, simultaneously detaching you from your surroundings while concentrating your awareness of the extraordinary taken-for-granted space you are inhabiting and on the voice you are listening to. For the best effect leave the headphones on for the whole performance to maintain the mood. Station Stories is theatrical because it is performed in different spaces – some grand, some intimate – in an extraordinary building; the general public become an unwitting supporting cast to a drama they are unaware is unfolding, providing a lovely, unpredictable choreography of movement that becomes fascinating from your viewpoint. People notice the strange crowd of people in headphones and somehow that makes you performers in the piece too.
The stories are diverse and draw you in, occasionally scattering your attention from the intimate voice in your head out across the station concourse or to a physical point – a lift door, a dropped piece of paper. The final story by Nicholas Royle, simply performed to the sad, dramatic backdrop of arriving and departing trains against the gently darkening sky above the main train hall was powerfully moving. Jenn Ashworth’s story is quirkily disturbing, but all six are good, strongly characterised and well-written.
Technically audacious but delivered with winning simplicity Station Stories is a completely satisfying experience that takes you on an emotional journey in a place where hundred of people are hurrying to and from actual journeys.
Claire Massey, Gathering Scraps blog
I spent this evening in Manchester Piccadilly railway station. That, in itself, isn't very unusual for me. I spend a lot of time in train stations and I'm always happy to do so. I often have one book, or several, in my bag but I'll sit and not read and watch the goings-on around me instead. I think most people have probably sat and watched and made stories up about their fellow travellers. Whether it's the girl with her shoes in her hand and plasters on her toes, or the man who is only pretending to read (you know because he isn't turning pages), or the woman who is sat on a bench wiping her eyes. But tonight I got to hear people's stories in a fascinating set of readings called Station Stories. This basically involved six writers, each with a story to tell, and an audience wearing wireless headphones listening in. And the writers and audience moved around the station amongst the completely oblivious public.
The stories were intriguing and haunting and they were read over an atmospheric live soundtrack. The writers took their inspiration from spending time at the station and came up with six brilliant and diverse stories. They made me think about the inner turmoils we carry around in an often unseeing world, about the urge to destroy reminders of the past, about the need to make things hurt less and the lengths to which someone would go to ease the pain, about the wealth of awareness that invisibility can bring, about secret places in stations, about the potentiality of a station's space, and about the sadness of waiting for a train that will never arrive. Hats off to the wonderful work of the writers, David Gaffney, Jenn Ashworth, Peter Wild, Thomas Fletcher, Tom Jenks and Nicholas Royle, and to the rest of the team behind the project.
The fact that the readings took place in a bustling station full of people, who at times glanced at the strange-looking group wearing headphones or at the peculiar behavior of the writers, added a fantastic element of suspense to the event and another layer to the stories. When one writer was littering the station with old greeting cards he was challenged by stranger and had to pick a card back up. And I loved watching a woman fight the urge to pick up a card that had fallen from the balcony above her whilst she waited for her order from Burger King. In the end, she tilted her head to read what was written inside it instead.
Listening to the stories whilst walking round the station made me realise just how unusual an environment a station is because it's clean of everything but people, who crowd and swarm and brush past each other's lives as they make their way to somewhere else. The grand architecture of stations like Piccadilly — elaborate constructions of metal and glass with cavernous interiors that make them seem set for a performance — is completely unnecessary. Trains aren't tall. But what a marvellous backdrop against which to watch and listen and wonder about people.
When the readings finished and I had to take my headphones off and hand them back I felt like I'd lost something. I was worried at first that the station could never again feel as alive with story as it had done tonight. Then I realised Station Stories may have been an unrepeatable experience, but it has left me with the reminder that the stories are always there.
Nija Dalal, Bad Penny blog
Piccadilly train station is, perhaps, not quite at the centre of the city, but it is Manchester's main train station. Its current incarnation was built in the 60s, and as such, it is an enormous glass structure. In its own way, it can be beautiful.
It is modern, with digital arrival and departure signs. 12 train platforms, as well as the Metrolink light rail platforms below. It is also a mall, housing Starbucks, Monsoon, TieRack, and the only Manchester branch of the enormous UK chain The Bagel Factory, which sells and promotes bagels as "America's best kept health secret!" Indicating, of course, a nearly complete misunderstanding of bagels, Americans, and more generally, perhaps more sadly, health.
But what is a train station? For the most part, I think, for most people, a train station is a waiting place. A place merely designed to take you from home to a place you want or need to be. It is a place you deal with, a place where you undergo sacrifice of time and pleasure, in order to get somewhere you would prefer to be. Or perhaps somewhere you have to be.
A train station is also a public place, where many people have private trajectories. Some are coming home, some are starting holidays. Some are leaving for work, some arriving from it. In many public places, everyone is largely doing the same thing, in restaurants, most people eat. But train stations are a special sort of public place, with special rules. You do not usually congregate in a train station. You pay 30p to use the restroom. There are special rules.
And for the most part, I think, for most people, not a lot happens in a train station. It is a waiting place. It is a getting from here to there place. It is just an in-between place.
Sure it is a shopping place, too. But only as a product of waiting. You wouldn't go to the train station to shop. You would shop there only because you had to wait there. It is a drinking and eating place, as well, but again. Only because of the waiting. **
Now imagine this:
Approximately 12 strangers stand on the mezzanine of Piccadilly Station, looking down at the ground floor. Imagine you are watching the amorphous crowd. You stand, watching, picking out individuals as they make their ways through the station. This one has an enormous backpack. Maybe she's on her way to the trip of a lifetime. Maybe she's just returned from it. Maybe, just maybe, you think, Manchester is part of it.
Now imagine this:
You and approximately 11 strangers are not only standing on a mezzanine and watching. You are all also wearing headphones, making you look, if anyone cared to look, like a group of very special people.
See what I mean?
Regardless.
In the headphones, you hear ambient music, sounds from around the train station. You can also hear muffled announcements, fighting their way into your ears, despite the headphones.
And then you hear a man's voice, very nearly inside your head, telling you the story of the girl he met, loved and lost at the train station.
You hear him, but you do not see him. He is one of the crowd.
And because you cannot see him, he could be anyone. These thoughts, this story you're hearing, they could be anyone's. Because a train station is a waiting place, that makes it also, strangely sometimes, a thinking place. And any of these people you're watching could be thinking this. Something like this.
Eventually, if you pay attention, he makes himself known. He wanders through the crowd, speaking quietly into a wireless microphone, and though you are 50 feet away, you can hear him just as you could if he were in your bed, telling you everything he'd been through with that woman. It feels like he's talking to you.
Really, he's talking to you. And approximately 11 strangers.
He told us his story, about how she wrote him cards, and how he needed to get rid of them, now that she wasn't his any longer. He tries leaving them around the station these days, he says, but it's hard. People are always noticing, giving them back to him. "Hey, mate! You dropped this!"
And as in his story, so in real life. You and approximately 11 strangers are the only ones, you see, who know he's trying to drop these things. And you are unnoticed. You are 50 feet away. There are many people in this train station who are there merely to wait, and they do what people do. Mostly, they do not notice. They do not notice him dropping his love letters, and they do not notice approximately 12 strangers watching them, with headphones on. But some do notice.
"Hey mate," they say, in entirely good faith. "You dropped this!"
He takes the card back, and thanks them for noticing, and continues telling his story and drops the card again.
And you stand there on the mezzanine and listen to this private story unfold. You watch and hear this performance, performed for an intimate audience: only you and approximately 11 strangers.
Is a train station, then, a private place?
Or is a train station, then, a theatre?
We heard six stories that day, performed by six writers. They performed at different parts of the station, and we walked to varying areas to hear and sometimes see them.
David Gaffney, Nicholas Royle, and Jenn Ashworth were especially memorable, perhaps only because I had already heard of those writers. Or perhaps because I could, in some way, relate to the stories they told.
There was a very obscure sort of poetry by Tom Jenks that was difficult to hang onto because I could not read his words as he said them, and his words were sometimes tricks, as poems can sometimes be. There was a conspiracy tale about the Masons.
Their stories were live-mixed with music and sounds from around the train station. Very cool technology was used to transmit the live-mix to our headphones.
It was futuristic. No. It was the future. I think this because Station Stories, in a way, raised almost too many questions for it not to be the future.
Architectural questions.
For example:
What is a train station?
When you really start thinking about them, they are truly strange places. They are never fully closed, so there is never really an "inside." They have doors that demarcate inside and outside for people. But the doors for the trains are always open to the outside. Perhaps it makes sense for them to mix public and private like this, to be so ambiguous
Dramatic questions.
For example:
What is a stage?
For Station Stories, the thoroughfares were the stage, sometimes. And sometimes the dead spaces of the station were the stage.
Ethical questions.
For example:
Is it ok to have people to unintentionally become part of a performance against their knowledge and/or will? Or where is the line between art and life, and are we allowed to find them and trample on them in this way? Are we not allowed? Who lays down those rules?
Anthropological questions.
For example:
What is a performance? And who are performers?
The writers, surely, were performing. Traditionally. But what of the strangers who didn't know what was going on, and yet still played by the special rules of the train station, by refusing to let a man drop a card and keep walking? What of them doing what was expected? What of the others who ignored the cards, who didn't notice the cards? What of them doing what was equally expected?
And more to the point and to the problem questions.
For example:
What of us?
Occasionally people pointed up at the mezzanine, alerting their family to our presence, laughed at the specials, or just looked confused in our direction. We looked back, sometimes. That, too, was that a performance?
....
Of course, individual lives and stories and trajectories are going on everywhere all the time. Only a solipsist could imagine otherwise.
But Station Stories made it art, made it high-tech, and because of the excellent writers, it was damn engaging, too. Craig said I had this face on the whole time:
Which is too bad, because I feel like I look rather stern and unhappy in that picture. Just about angry.
"No," he said. "That's what you look like when you're thinking."
Oh, dear. I might need to stop thinking so much, if that's how I look, I said.
And he said something sweet, like he does, because he's that sort of person. It was, undoubtedly, loving. The kind of thing he says all the time that I forget quite easily. I'm that sort of person.
...
Two days later, we were back at Piccadilly, this time having a private story of our own in that very public space. He was leaving again, and this time I won't see him for probably a full year, unless we manage something magical. He probably did, but I can't remember if he told me this time that I look beautiful.
I don't remember the right things sometimes. I'm that sort of person.
Holly Ringland, Little Bird Stories blog
A few weeks ago on a moody Saturday I rushed into Manchester city, eager not to be late. As always when I’m about to stray from my pocket of geographic comfort to somewhere new, I had kaleidoscopic butterflies in my belly. I hadn’t packed a bag. My ticket appeared to be a one way deal. And, I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going. I only knew I was about to go on an adventure that was unlike any I’d experienced before.
Station Stories is a literature live event that took place at the end of May in one of the main arteries of northwest England’s transport heart, amongst the hubub of Saturday travellers arriving and departing, in transit, en route to someplace else. I arrived at Manchester Piccadilly train station clutching my ticket and with a sigh of relief found the familiar faces also along for the joyride. I gladly recognised anxious jitters underneath the smiles that greeted me, and I realised that I wasn’t alone in being unsure of what we were in for. Quick and quiet chatter confirmed we were all enticed though, by the tidbits we’d glimpsed in advance on the website:
You are at Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station – You are wearing headphones – You are with a group all wearing headphones – The stations is crowded, people rushing everywhere – You can hear someone speaking in your headphones. She is telling you a story – The reader of the story is somewhere in the crowd, she is reading the story now, it’s live – You try to pick her out from the crowd – Eventually she comes into view – She continues to tell the story. She talks to rail travelers around her. They don’t know she is telling a story. They don’t know she is transmitting live – They don’t know about us – This is story telling with a difference – This is performance with a difference – This is Station Stories.
Do you remember the first time you saw or read about Mary Poppins, and the way you felt when she lined Jane, Michael, and Bert up, spit spot, and granted them passage into the very real world of Bert’s chalk drawings on the pavement of Cherry Tree Lane? Outside of Samantha Stephens’ nose-wriggling trick, having the ability to physically jump into the world of someone else’s imagination is something always I’ve coveted.
So when I was given my set of headphones and was guided amongst the hustle bustle of the train station to a point in the thick of it where I huddled with my group to listen to a story being read to me by its author, as he/she appeared before my eyes in amongst the hoards of passengers parting and closing and around them, I felt like I had jumped, closed my eyes, and opened them again to see the world through someone else’s. I was in a chalk drawing created by someone else’s hand, seeing a story unravel and come to life in front of me as I heard it and felt it go through me. The sensation was overwhelming.Station Stories was a blow to the senses and the mind on a number of levels. It engaged the audience as characters within a fiction set amongst a public mass revolving through a static place. We were not just observers, we were part of the backdrop, part of the setting in each of the six stories we listened to and watched unravel.
At the same time, Station Stories offered the ultimate guilty pleasure of ‘people-watching’, of complete and unfettered voyeurism, as we stood amongst but separate to the public, observing how the author, the narrator, mingled amongst the crowd, as just another traveller, wanderer, passerby.
Then there was the public’s reaction to the group gathered with headphones on and eyes transfixed on one common spot – on one common person. Overheard: What is going on? Is that guy throwing away love letters? Did you see that girl in fishnets? Undercover cops are here man, that dude’s wearing a microphone.
As people became aware of something out of the ordinary happening near them, when they heard a man or woman apparently talking to themselves, telling themselves a story, the varying reactions, or attempts to not react at all, were utterly fascinating. We try to put our blinkers on and ignore each other’s stories but the hooks and bait are too much. Curiosity about each other’s story is, it would appear, inherent.
And all things experiential aside, the quality of the fiction itself was razor-sharp, visceral, and beguiling, encompassing tales of love, murder, grief, conspiracy, madness and revenge. The six participating authors included David Gaffney, Jenn Ashworth, Nicholas Royle, Peter Wild, Tom Jenks and Tom Fletcher. Picking a favourite is impossible and I refuse to try.
On every level, Station Stories was an experience that saturated my senses and soaked my imagination through.
David Gaffney, left, kicking off with a story of aching beauty told beside the watchful gaze of local station police. Continuing to unravel his tale over the spontaneous din and chaos of football fans; the unplanned calamity of it added such perfect drama to his fiction.
Jenn Ashworth... in all her splendour as Anne, the girl who revealed where our souls actually physically are.Perfect combination: a woman scorned, fishnets, red heels and a photo booth. Jenn's legs, it has to be said, caused quite the public ruckus, much to our chortling glee.
Peter Wild, and his gritty luminous tale of transit.There was one moment when Pete was reading and there was barely a soul around him. Again, unplanned serendipity collided with his fiction.
Left behind; a piece of Tom Fletcher's brilliant madness. A speck in transit: Tom Jenks sits beside a passenger on a bench waiting, waiting... waiting.
Tom and his luggage trolley of missed chances...
The final Station Stories crowd watches and listens as Nick wraps up the final beautiful sucker-punching story. Nicholas Royle waiting for a train that will never come.I tell you, his flask and yellow scarf just about broke my heart.
I’ve been waiting until I was on a train to write this post. It felt the only apt way to tie up the loose ends in me that have been unravelling slowly since I got so pleasantly and willingly tangled in Station Stories.
So here I am now in a window seat, three weeks later, scribbling into my notebook and going through my photos that are like proof of a dream. Proof of when I, and lucky others, immersed ourselves in the ink and pulp of someone else’s three-dimensional story world.
My carriage rocks and lulls me home. The countryside passes me by in a green blur.
I look around me at other passengers, and the staff serving tea and coffee, and still feel awed, and unsettled, by my heightened awareness of understanding the sheer magnitude of what Station Stories hailed loud and clear: every day, every person, everywhere you look, is telling themselves their own story, is carrying an infinitesimal number of them. And if you leant your ear the right way when the wind changed, imagine the endless possibilities of stories you could jump into and explore the world through.
Of all the realisations and perceptions I experienced during Station Stories, this is what I will keep with me. Regardless of our diversities, or of how swept up we get in the speed of life, always on our way to someplace else, caught in the grip of things we believe are important, we are all in each of us storytellers. Keepers of our own chalk drawings.
And when all is said and done, that’s something. A fairly enormous something. A little bit of magic readily available to us that we can conjure, or jump into, on any ordinary day.
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Station Stories has arrived on Platform 5, and 10, and in fact the whole of Manchester Piccadilly, and the service is running three times a day over three days. The eagerly awaited site-specific literary project sees six North West-based writers (David Gaffney, Jenn Ashworth, Peter Wild, Tom Fletcher, Tom Jenks, pictured below, and Nicholas Royle, pictured above) each reading their self-penned tales of trainspotting and trauma in different locations around the concourse, trailed by a group of audience members in headphones.
“Station Stories will take people on a literary journey,” project creator David Gaffney had told me before the project got underway – and he’s not wrong. As you follow the lovely Diana or Mark around the transport hub to particular points to listen in live to the storyteller and soundscape, you do almost feel as much a traveller as the suited businessman dashing past you for a cab or the student dragging a wheelie case into the back of your ankle. The experience is very fluid and, even when you’re standing still for a story, the sense of movement continues as you track the performer wandering through the crowd, find yourself watching the passengers milling about or gaze at the trains rolling past.
I was privy to some of the project details in advance, but even for me there were surprises! David had hinted at littering, and one man almost confronted him about dropping cards on the floor, but was distracted by a phone call. Jenn Ashworth had mentioned to me that she had something special up her sleeve, and the minxy outfit she wears as her character certainly is something... All six writers use props and interact with people or place to create a performance and this, along with six vastly different writing styles and an ever-changing live soundtrack, results in a multi-layered event that is so much more than a standard reading.
The station building itself plays a huge part, and you notice architecture and structure from unusual angles and explore what are ordinarily non-spaces. Even the audience becomes inadvertently involved, and we were waved at, pointed at, stared at, even shrieked at. But despite drawing attention, the headphones make you feel cocooned somehow, as if you’re in a secret world with the writer, despite the other audience members. David was quite right when he told me: “Listening to a live performer in a public place in this way is like being linked directly into someone’s head. It is uniquely intimate and public.”
For Books' Sake
Station Stories rolls into Manchester Piccadilly at midday on Thursday, with three slots a day over three days. The eagerly awaited site-specific literary project sees six North West-based writers performing brand new tales of trains and tracks in various locations around the transport hub, each with its own set-up and each with a specially commissioned soundscape by Landcrash, aka musician Daniel Hopkins.
“Station Stories will take people on a literary journey,” says flash fiction author and novelist David Gaffney, who came up with the idea. “It will explore the day-to-day life of the station – its platforms, its workers, the journeys people take, the waiting, the encounters, the thrill, the loneliness, the joy, and it will express the peculiar, unique qualities of the station – a marginal, in-between world.”
Members of the audience will be given headphones and taken around the concourse to particular points to listen to the live broadcasts and play spot the storyteller. Some of the writers will be easily identified: one, Nicholas Royle, sits at the end of Platform 5 with a notebook and a flask of soup while reading The Lancashire Fusilier; another, Jenn Ashworth, is in a photo booth. The others will be less obvious, and members of the public may even interact with them – especially if provoked, for example by blatant littering.
“The unpredictability of it is something I found really attractive,” says Ashworth. “Each performance – and each of the pieces – is going to be quite different, yet as a whole they work together to give a flavour of the lives and stories that might be whirling around Piccadilly at any moment.”
Gaffney – whose flash fiction collection The Half-life Of Songs was recently longlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize – says all six stories “are unique to the station setting”.
As well as his contribution, Hidden Obvious Typical, there is Marble by horror author Tom Fletcher, Terminus by poet Tom Jenks, and three versions of The People Spotter (one for each of the three different performance times) by Bookmunch editor Peter Wild.
Of the six writers involved in the project, Ashworth – whose début A Kind Of Intimacy and newly published Cold Light are both critically-acclaimed – is the only woman, although she says the “difference between the stories is more to do with our versatility as writers and our own particular interests than our genders”. She does, however, concede: “My story, Soulless, is a playful reply to Anna Karenina - possibly the most famous woman ever to have done anything in a train station!”
Ashworth continues: “Station Stories is really exciting because it’s something very different to other projects I’ve been a part of – I decided to get involved because working with a sound team on a project that relies so much on the ambience of the space really tied into my interest in collaboration and writing that makes special use of setting.
“Working with the sound technician has made me view my performance and the train station itself in an entirely new way. I don’t think I’ll ever walk through the station again without thinking about the characters the six of us have invented – the voices we’re setting free there – and, after our performances, I don’t think the audience will either. They’re in for a treat!”
The Public Reviews
Station Stories is a new twist on immersive promenade theatre with a strong literary slant. A discreet public performance in a very public place.
Having booked your place on the Station Stories website, you arrive at the Station Stories stand inside the entrance of Piccadilly Station, where you are issued with a set of wireless headphones and a lanyard that identifies you as an audience member (in case you bump up against Network Rail officialdom). Once everyone is assembled – there were 28 in our group – after a short briefing you are led to a series of six locations around the station. In each location you are told a story, recounted by the author as they wander around the concourse or platform or wherever you happen to be. For the most part you are invisible to them. This is a kind of eavesdropping. You have to work out where they are and watch them as they linger or merge with the general traffic of the station. It’s also a kind of heightened people-watching, as if you have developed the uncanny ability to hear other people’s thoughts as they pass though this place of transit and waiting.
Even though you are in a group and gently marshalled from site to site, with the headphones on Station Stories is a surprisingly intimate experience that makes you feel slightly detached from the busy space you are inhabiting and the group you are with and yet strangely connected to random strangers within that space. The stories tell of love and loss and obsession and grief, all connected in some way with being in or travelling through Piccadilly. Station Stories has a cinematic quality as you watch a real-life wide-screen vista with a soundtrack playing in your head. Original music by sound artist Daniel Hopkins blended with samples and found sounds mixed live by Hopkins and sound engineer Rory McGarrigle is moodily atmospheric, simultaneously detaching you from your surroundings while concentrating your awareness of the extraordinary taken-for-granted space you are inhabiting and on the voice you are listening to. For the best effect leave the headphones on for the whole performance to maintain the mood. Station Stories is theatrical because it is performed in different spaces – some grand, some intimate – in an extraordinary building; the general public become an unwitting supporting cast to a drama they are unaware is unfolding, providing a lovely, unpredictable choreography of movement that becomes fascinating from your viewpoint. People notice the strange crowd of people in headphones and somehow that makes you performers in the piece too.
The stories are diverse and draw you in, occasionally scattering your attention from the intimate voice in your head out across the station concourse or to a physical point – a lift door, a dropped piece of paper. The final story by Nicholas Royle, simply performed to the sad, dramatic backdrop of arriving and departing trains against the gently darkening sky above the main train hall was powerfully moving. Jenn Ashworth’s story is quirkily disturbing, but all six are good, strongly characterised and well-written.
Technically audacious but delivered with winning simplicity Station Stories is a completely satisfying experience that takes you on an emotional journey in a place where hundred of people are hurrying to and from actual journeys.
Claire Massey, Gathering Scraps blog
I spent this evening in Manchester Piccadilly railway station. That, in itself, isn't very unusual for me. I spend a lot of time in train stations and I'm always happy to do so. I often have one book, or several, in my bag but I'll sit and not read and watch the goings-on around me instead. I think most people have probably sat and watched and made stories up about their fellow travellers. Whether it's the girl with her shoes in her hand and plasters on her toes, or the man who is only pretending to read (you know because he isn't turning pages), or the woman who is sat on a bench wiping her eyes. But tonight I got to hear people's stories in a fascinating set of readings called Station Stories. This basically involved six writers, each with a story to tell, and an audience wearing wireless headphones listening in. And the writers and audience moved around the station amongst the completely oblivious public.
The stories were intriguing and haunting and they were read over an atmospheric live soundtrack. The writers took their inspiration from spending time at the station and came up with six brilliant and diverse stories. They made me think about the inner turmoils we carry around in an often unseeing world, about the urge to destroy reminders of the past, about the need to make things hurt less and the lengths to which someone would go to ease the pain, about the wealth of awareness that invisibility can bring, about secret places in stations, about the potentiality of a station's space, and about the sadness of waiting for a train that will never arrive. Hats off to the wonderful work of the writers, David Gaffney, Jenn Ashworth, Peter Wild, Thomas Fletcher, Tom Jenks and Nicholas Royle, and to the rest of the team behind the project.
The fact that the readings took place in a bustling station full of people, who at times glanced at the strange-looking group wearing headphones or at the peculiar behavior of the writers, added a fantastic element of suspense to the event and another layer to the stories. When one writer was littering the station with old greeting cards he was challenged by stranger and had to pick a card back up. And I loved watching a woman fight the urge to pick up a card that had fallen from the balcony above her whilst she waited for her order from Burger King. In the end, she tilted her head to read what was written inside it instead.
Listening to the stories whilst walking round the station made me realise just how unusual an environment a station is because it's clean of everything but people, who crowd and swarm and brush past each other's lives as they make their way to somewhere else. The grand architecture of stations like Piccadilly — elaborate constructions of metal and glass with cavernous interiors that make them seem set for a performance — is completely unnecessary. Trains aren't tall. But what a marvellous backdrop against which to watch and listen and wonder about people.
When the readings finished and I had to take my headphones off and hand them back I felt like I'd lost something. I was worried at first that the station could never again feel as alive with story as it had done tonight. Then I realised Station Stories may have been an unrepeatable experience, but it has left me with the reminder that the stories are always there.
Nija Dalal, Bad Penny blog
Piccadilly train station is, perhaps, not quite at the centre of the city, but it is Manchester's main train station. Its current incarnation was built in the 60s, and as such, it is an enormous glass structure. In its own way, it can be beautiful.
It is modern, with digital arrival and departure signs. 12 train platforms, as well as the Metrolink light rail platforms below. It is also a mall, housing Starbucks, Monsoon, TieRack, and the only Manchester branch of the enormous UK chain The Bagel Factory, which sells and promotes bagels as "America's best kept health secret!" Indicating, of course, a nearly complete misunderstanding of bagels, Americans, and more generally, perhaps more sadly, health.
But what is a train station? For the most part, I think, for most people, a train station is a waiting place. A place merely designed to take you from home to a place you want or need to be. It is a place you deal with, a place where you undergo sacrifice of time and pleasure, in order to get somewhere you would prefer to be. Or perhaps somewhere you have to be.
A train station is also a public place, where many people have private trajectories. Some are coming home, some are starting holidays. Some are leaving for work, some arriving from it. In many public places, everyone is largely doing the same thing, in restaurants, most people eat. But train stations are a special sort of public place, with special rules. You do not usually congregate in a train station. You pay 30p to use the restroom. There are special rules.
And for the most part, I think, for most people, not a lot happens in a train station. It is a waiting place. It is a getting from here to there place. It is just an in-between place.
Sure it is a shopping place, too. But only as a product of waiting. You wouldn't go to the train station to shop. You would shop there only because you had to wait there. It is a drinking and eating place, as well, but again. Only because of the waiting. **
Now imagine this:
Approximately 12 strangers stand on the mezzanine of Piccadilly Station, looking down at the ground floor. Imagine you are watching the amorphous crowd. You stand, watching, picking out individuals as they make their ways through the station. This one has an enormous backpack. Maybe she's on her way to the trip of a lifetime. Maybe she's just returned from it. Maybe, just maybe, you think, Manchester is part of it.
Now imagine this:
You and approximately 11 strangers are not only standing on a mezzanine and watching. You are all also wearing headphones, making you look, if anyone cared to look, like a group of very special people.
See what I mean?
Regardless.
In the headphones, you hear ambient music, sounds from around the train station. You can also hear muffled announcements, fighting their way into your ears, despite the headphones.
And then you hear a man's voice, very nearly inside your head, telling you the story of the girl he met, loved and lost at the train station.
You hear him, but you do not see him. He is one of the crowd.
And because you cannot see him, he could be anyone. These thoughts, this story you're hearing, they could be anyone's. Because a train station is a waiting place, that makes it also, strangely sometimes, a thinking place. And any of these people you're watching could be thinking this. Something like this.
Eventually, if you pay attention, he makes himself known. He wanders through the crowd, speaking quietly into a wireless microphone, and though you are 50 feet away, you can hear him just as you could if he were in your bed, telling you everything he'd been through with that woman. It feels like he's talking to you.
Really, he's talking to you. And approximately 11 strangers.
He told us his story, about how she wrote him cards, and how he needed to get rid of them, now that she wasn't his any longer. He tries leaving them around the station these days, he says, but it's hard. People are always noticing, giving them back to him. "Hey, mate! You dropped this!"
And as in his story, so in real life. You and approximately 11 strangers are the only ones, you see, who know he's trying to drop these things. And you are unnoticed. You are 50 feet away. There are many people in this train station who are there merely to wait, and they do what people do. Mostly, they do not notice. They do not notice him dropping his love letters, and they do not notice approximately 12 strangers watching them, with headphones on. But some do notice.
"Hey mate," they say, in entirely good faith. "You dropped this!"
He takes the card back, and thanks them for noticing, and continues telling his story and drops the card again.
And you stand there on the mezzanine and listen to this private story unfold. You watch and hear this performance, performed for an intimate audience: only you and approximately 11 strangers.
Is a train station, then, a private place?
Or is a train station, then, a theatre?
We heard six stories that day, performed by six writers. They performed at different parts of the station, and we walked to varying areas to hear and sometimes see them.
David Gaffney, Nicholas Royle, and Jenn Ashworth were especially memorable, perhaps only because I had already heard of those writers. Or perhaps because I could, in some way, relate to the stories they told.
There was a very obscure sort of poetry by Tom Jenks that was difficult to hang onto because I could not read his words as he said them, and his words were sometimes tricks, as poems can sometimes be. There was a conspiracy tale about the Masons.
Their stories were live-mixed with music and sounds from around the train station. Very cool technology was used to transmit the live-mix to our headphones.
It was futuristic. No. It was the future. I think this because Station Stories, in a way, raised almost too many questions for it not to be the future.
Architectural questions.
For example:
What is a train station?
When you really start thinking about them, they are truly strange places. They are never fully closed, so there is never really an "inside." They have doors that demarcate inside and outside for people. But the doors for the trains are always open to the outside. Perhaps it makes sense for them to mix public and private like this, to be so ambiguous
Dramatic questions.
For example:
What is a stage?
For Station Stories, the thoroughfares were the stage, sometimes. And sometimes the dead spaces of the station were the stage.
Ethical questions.
For example:
Is it ok to have people to unintentionally become part of a performance against their knowledge and/or will? Or where is the line between art and life, and are we allowed to find them and trample on them in this way? Are we not allowed? Who lays down those rules?
Anthropological questions.
For example:
What is a performance? And who are performers?
The writers, surely, were performing. Traditionally. But what of the strangers who didn't know what was going on, and yet still played by the special rules of the train station, by refusing to let a man drop a card and keep walking? What of them doing what was expected? What of the others who ignored the cards, who didn't notice the cards? What of them doing what was equally expected?
And more to the point and to the problem questions.
For example:
What of us?
Occasionally people pointed up at the mezzanine, alerting their family to our presence, laughed at the specials, or just looked confused in our direction. We looked back, sometimes. That, too, was that a performance?
....
Of course, individual lives and stories and trajectories are going on everywhere all the time. Only a solipsist could imagine otherwise.
But Station Stories made it art, made it high-tech, and because of the excellent writers, it was damn engaging, too. Craig said I had this face on the whole time:
Which is too bad, because I feel like I look rather stern and unhappy in that picture. Just about angry.
"No," he said. "That's what you look like when you're thinking."
Oh, dear. I might need to stop thinking so much, if that's how I look, I said.
And he said something sweet, like he does, because he's that sort of person. It was, undoubtedly, loving. The kind of thing he says all the time that I forget quite easily. I'm that sort of person.
...
Two days later, we were back at Piccadilly, this time having a private story of our own in that very public space. He was leaving again, and this time I won't see him for probably a full year, unless we manage something magical. He probably did, but I can't remember if he told me this time that I look beautiful.
I don't remember the right things sometimes. I'm that sort of person.
Holly Ringland, Little Bird Stories blog
A few weeks ago on a moody Saturday I rushed into Manchester city, eager not to be late. As always when I’m about to stray from my pocket of geographic comfort to somewhere new, I had kaleidoscopic butterflies in my belly. I hadn’t packed a bag. My ticket appeared to be a one way deal. And, I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going. I only knew I was about to go on an adventure that was unlike any I’d experienced before.
Station Stories is a literature live event that took place at the end of May in one of the main arteries of northwest England’s transport heart, amongst the hubub of Saturday travellers arriving and departing, in transit, en route to someplace else. I arrived at Manchester Piccadilly train station clutching my ticket and with a sigh of relief found the familiar faces also along for the joyride. I gladly recognised anxious jitters underneath the smiles that greeted me, and I realised that I wasn’t alone in being unsure of what we were in for. Quick and quiet chatter confirmed we were all enticed though, by the tidbits we’d glimpsed in advance on the website:
You are at Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station – You are wearing headphones – You are with a group all wearing headphones – The stations is crowded, people rushing everywhere – You can hear someone speaking in your headphones. She is telling you a story – The reader of the story is somewhere in the crowd, she is reading the story now, it’s live – You try to pick her out from the crowd – Eventually she comes into view – She continues to tell the story. She talks to rail travelers around her. They don’t know she is telling a story. They don’t know she is transmitting live – They don’t know about us – This is story telling with a difference – This is performance with a difference – This is Station Stories.
Do you remember the first time you saw or read about Mary Poppins, and the way you felt when she lined Jane, Michael, and Bert up, spit spot, and granted them passage into the very real world of Bert’s chalk drawings on the pavement of Cherry Tree Lane? Outside of Samantha Stephens’ nose-wriggling trick, having the ability to physically jump into the world of someone else’s imagination is something always I’ve coveted.
So when I was given my set of headphones and was guided amongst the hustle bustle of the train station to a point in the thick of it where I huddled with my group to listen to a story being read to me by its author, as he/she appeared before my eyes in amongst the hoards of passengers parting and closing and around them, I felt like I had jumped, closed my eyes, and opened them again to see the world through someone else’s. I was in a chalk drawing created by someone else’s hand, seeing a story unravel and come to life in front of me as I heard it and felt it go through me. The sensation was overwhelming.Station Stories was a blow to the senses and the mind on a number of levels. It engaged the audience as characters within a fiction set amongst a public mass revolving through a static place. We were not just observers, we were part of the backdrop, part of the setting in each of the six stories we listened to and watched unravel.
At the same time, Station Stories offered the ultimate guilty pleasure of ‘people-watching’, of complete and unfettered voyeurism, as we stood amongst but separate to the public, observing how the author, the narrator, mingled amongst the crowd, as just another traveller, wanderer, passerby.
Then there was the public’s reaction to the group gathered with headphones on and eyes transfixed on one common spot – on one common person. Overheard: What is going on? Is that guy throwing away love letters? Did you see that girl in fishnets? Undercover cops are here man, that dude’s wearing a microphone.
As people became aware of something out of the ordinary happening near them, when they heard a man or woman apparently talking to themselves, telling themselves a story, the varying reactions, or attempts to not react at all, were utterly fascinating. We try to put our blinkers on and ignore each other’s stories but the hooks and bait are too much. Curiosity about each other’s story is, it would appear, inherent.
And all things experiential aside, the quality of the fiction itself was razor-sharp, visceral, and beguiling, encompassing tales of love, murder, grief, conspiracy, madness and revenge. The six participating authors included David Gaffney, Jenn Ashworth, Nicholas Royle, Peter Wild, Tom Jenks and Tom Fletcher. Picking a favourite is impossible and I refuse to try.
On every level, Station Stories was an experience that saturated my senses and soaked my imagination through.
David Gaffney, left, kicking off with a story of aching beauty told beside the watchful gaze of local station police. Continuing to unravel his tale over the spontaneous din and chaos of football fans; the unplanned calamity of it added such perfect drama to his fiction.
Jenn Ashworth... in all her splendour as Anne, the girl who revealed where our souls actually physically are.Perfect combination: a woman scorned, fishnets, red heels and a photo booth. Jenn's legs, it has to be said, caused quite the public ruckus, much to our chortling glee.
Peter Wild, and his gritty luminous tale of transit.There was one moment when Pete was reading and there was barely a soul around him. Again, unplanned serendipity collided with his fiction.
Left behind; a piece of Tom Fletcher's brilliant madness. A speck in transit: Tom Jenks sits beside a passenger on a bench waiting, waiting... waiting.
Tom and his luggage trolley of missed chances...
The final Station Stories crowd watches and listens as Nick wraps up the final beautiful sucker-punching story. Nicholas Royle waiting for a train that will never come.I tell you, his flask and yellow scarf just about broke my heart.
I’ve been waiting until I was on a train to write this post. It felt the only apt way to tie up the loose ends in me that have been unravelling slowly since I got so pleasantly and willingly tangled in Station Stories.
So here I am now in a window seat, three weeks later, scribbling into my notebook and going through my photos that are like proof of a dream. Proof of when I, and lucky others, immersed ourselves in the ink and pulp of someone else’s three-dimensional story world.
My carriage rocks and lulls me home. The countryside passes me by in a green blur.
I look around me at other passengers, and the staff serving tea and coffee, and still feel awed, and unsettled, by my heightened awareness of understanding the sheer magnitude of what Station Stories hailed loud and clear: every day, every person, everywhere you look, is telling themselves their own story, is carrying an infinitesimal number of them. And if you leant your ear the right way when the wind changed, imagine the endless possibilities of stories you could jump into and explore the world through.
Of all the realisations and perceptions I experienced during Station Stories, this is what I will keep with me. Regardless of our diversities, or of how swept up we get in the speed of life, always on our way to someplace else, caught in the grip of things we believe are important, we are all in each of us storytellers. Keepers of our own chalk drawings.
And when all is said and done, that’s something. A fairly enormous something. A little bit of magic readily available to us that we can conjure, or jump into, on any ordinary day.
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