Little Venice
Writer and Director - Martin Gorst
I've long been intrigued by the legend of canals running beneath the streets of Rhyl at the beginning of the 20th Century - initially the conspiratorial mutterings occasionally shared in late-night lock-ins, backed by steely certainty that somebody's cousin's neighbour knew a builder or electrician or council employee who had been down there under what was once the magnificent Queen’s Palace, and would swear to the existence of the dank and mossy but unmistakably Italianate canals...but more fascinatingly the revised theory, following the DCC purchase and excavation in 2019, that the whole thing was a fanciful legend, nothing more than a modest exhibition of Venetian artefacts, elaborated and glamorised over the decades in the local collective imagination to reinforce the status of the town as the jewel of Edwardian North Wales.
It's this aspect of community mythologising which inspired me to research the origins of the phenomenon with a view to writing an original play especially for the Liberty Players, based on the events of the time, leading up to the 1907 fire and establishing the rich soil of rumour and gossip that nurtured the seed of speculation which flourished into such a remarkable example of popular folklore. I could also see how the story might shine a stark satirical light, with effective historical objectivity, on the current culture of fake news, political cover-ups, industrial-scale scamming and the hazards of uninformed conjecture.
I realised of course that I should practise due diligence and pick the brains of respected local historians before I got much further with plotting out the dramatised version of events, if only to avoid traducing the reputations of anyone who may still have descendants in the area . Interestingly, these have still proved contradictory and inconclusive, and a recent social media post by a friend in a fishing expedition on my behalf yielded further obfuscation.
While my research has been predominantly online, I've identified certain key real-life characters who would inevitably have been involved in the construction of the Queen's Palace in the early years of the last century. Most significantly Percy J Ashfield the Manager, who according to Ancestry.com originally hailed from Stratford on Avon, but by the comparatively youthful age of 30 had already established a successful chemist shop on the High Street, ran a pub in the town and had become a luminary of the UDC and a veritable pillar of local society. Newspaper ads from the time show him as a resourceful and opportunistic entrepreneur, selling garlands to the crowds attending the visit of the Prince and Princes of Wales in 1902, which is where I've started the story.
Percy is therefore very much at the centre of the narrative, together with his wife Emily, but a Mr Goodall the Town Surveyor and Millicent Price the charismatic suffragette organiser who visited the town around the time are among other real-life individuals who influence the action, together with a number of fictional characters whose stories are interwoven with the mystery of Little Venice. The play contains elements of young romance, domestic violence, comedy, tragedy and a shocking dénouement.
As this is a new and original project written specifically for the company, I’m really not precious about the script, which I see more as a work in progress, and I’d love to collaborate with the cast on creating believable and relatable characters who audiences will care about, and a story which will stir up debate within the town long after the final curtain falls.
If you want to read a synopsis of the play, please click here.
About Me as a Playwright
I have written many works for the stage since I studied playwriting as part of the Creative Arts degree course I completed in 1989.
Among those that have been produced in various theatres are:
- Stormchild – an original musical about the Norse discovery of America
- Sidney and the Sunshine Stealers – an original pantomime with songs
- The Railway Children – book and lyrics for a new stage adaptation with the composer Paul Bexon
- The Ballad Of William Owen – an original play with songs, chronicling the colourful life of the notorious Pembrokeshire smuggler
Plus songs and sketches for the Liberty Players’ Christmas 2016 variety show Humbug!
Further background information about the project can be found at the following links:
Little Venice Rhyl a Mystery or Myth Below Queens Market? (blazingminds.co.uk)
Secrets of the Welsh Seaside: Little Venice, the underground waterway of Rhyl (youtube.com)