Sorter opens in the Grand Theatre Swansea this week. The debut work of a new creative collective in the city, Sorter is a story about “two very different people that are involved in the world of opioid addiction.”
The play’s writer, co producer and actor, Richard Mylan, talked to Mark Redfern about the characters, the writing process and how his own experience of addiction found its way onto the stage.
By Mark Redfern. Cover image. Mylan, right, with co-star Sophie Melville, by Kirsten McTernan
If you can’t afford a car you’ve got to walk or wait. Nobody likes waiting for the bus. It might not even show up at all. We run through draft excuses that we’ll tell our boss, our mate, our dealer. It’s a staple of working class life. That’s why, on entering the Grand Swansea Theatre, expect to wince. Two anonymous figures wait in a bus shelter for the audience to settle. They wait until we wait. Perching. Leaning. Pacing.
A young mother, Example A, played by Sophie Melville, wrestles with life on the street as she taunts herself for having had her three children taken away from her by the state. An ex-convict, Example B, played by writer Richard Mylan, adjusts to his new life whilst he reckons with how he got into the mess he finds himself in. They wait for the bus together, tumbling through their hectic recollections of their routes to addiction whilst avoiding eye contact with each other.
As their monologues progress we hear about strategies for begging at NCP car parks after punters have their “retail hit”, the no-man’s-land of the Accident and Emergency room, and the dreamland of Mumbles promenade among other name-checks of Swansea. Beneath the humour and surrealism though is an undercurrent of gritty lived experience taken from Mylan’s long stretch addicted to opiates.
The writing process was tough, Mylan told voice.wales, trying to find the right medium to process his thoughts on the time spent in the fog of addiction:
“I was going to write it all out in diary form just to document my times so I could make sense of it. I really struggled to do that. I think it was because I was still in the shame of it all, and probably in a bit of denial. I found it really hard to put myself in the first person.”
During the lull of the pandemic lockdown Mylan wrote Sorter. Writing his story through two characters gave a comfortable distance to process his journey:
“When I did that, the whole of that twenty years flew out of me in three weeks. It all came out on the page. Initially it was really hard but it ended up in a really cathartic, healing process because it made sense of a really chaotic, turbulent, dangerous time. It was out of my mind and it had an immediate effect on my mental health. It was like a flash flood of catharsis.”
“Sorter is about two very different people that are involved in the world of opioid addiction, and one is what you would call, generally, typical,” he explains. “The type of addict we would see on the street and would walk past. We have very strong opinions but know little about the day-to-day reality of that addict. Hopefully the play will challenge those opinions.”
Melville’s character has a frantic charm that is hard to dislike and even harder to ignore.The Swansea native won plaudits for a similarly energetic role in Gary Owens’ Iphigenia in Splott.
“But then we’ve got somebody who’s not typical,” Mylan continues. “I definitely regard myself as not a typical heroin addict. I’m obviously in recovery but when I was using I wasn’t your typical heroin addict. I wanted to show the point of view of the functioning heroin addict, because we don’t have an opinion on those because they are generally not known about because everyone is so scared of the stigma around it that nobody comes forward and talks about it.”
Mylan opened up publicly about his drug use for the first time early last year in an effort to destigmatise heroin use, hoping to encourage others to seek help. “I didn’t get help for twenty years. I was petrified about it being public knowledge,” he says.
“I remember early on in my career, this actor from Eastenders got found out for taking heroin. His career was over, one article finished him. Never heard of him again. That always stuck with me. He was publicly flogged for it. That all feeds into that stigma and selective empathy response. That totally stopped me from getting help.”
He’s quick to point out that there’s not many heroin users that serve as heroes in popular culture, apart from 1996’s Scottish hit Trainspotting, despite these issues affecting large swathes of the population:
“There’s very little representation when you think about it which it always baffles me a little bit… Yeah it glorifies and it’s a cinematic representation of that world, but on a deeper level you see the humanity more because you’ve lived in that world for an hour. That’s what the play does. You come along to this play and you absorb the world more. You come away with this deeper understanding of that world.”
Sorter is the debut of a dynamic new creative collective Grand Ambition, whose work is grounded in Swansea life, propelled by Swansea artists Mylan, Steve Balsamo, Michelle McTernan and Christian Patterson, and based in the Swansea Grand Theatre.
A play about heroin addiction is set to be well-received by a city who struggles with the issue every day: “Swansea has a very visible problem,” Mylan explains.
“We’ve always had an issue with opioid addiction, and addiction in general, and it’s one that we’re constantly trying to challenge and fix. It’s also my home city. It’s where I work, it’s where I live everyday. It feels right for it to be set here. It’s where I used a lot too. My years as an addict were spent in London, Cardiff, and here in Swansea. It’s a true representation of my experience.”
voice.wales spoke to Mylan the day before opening night. How was he feeling, considering it’s a project with so much of his experience in the bones of it?
“It’s a whole new level of nerves and pressure because I’m used to just going on and portraying a role for a writer and a producer and a director. I’m the writer, co producer, and actor on the project so it’s a whole new level, one that I’m kind of grabbing with both hands.”
“I do realise I’m in an incredibly fortunate position to tell my story and effect any kind of change, no matter how small. So I’m happy really. But also shitting myself.”
Sorter runs at the Swansea Grand Theatre until Friday 10 March and you can get tickets here. Adferiad Cymru, a Wales-based addiction recovery charity, is supporting the production. They are holding a creative workshop in the theatre on Wednesday 8 March.
