FringeReview UK 2025

We Are the Lions, Mr Manager

Townsend Theatre Productions

Genre: Biographical Drama, Drama, Feminist Theatre, Fringe Theatre, Historical, Live Music, Political, Theatre

Venue: Brighthelm Centre, Brighton

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“What you are running is not a factory, it is a zoo. But in a zoo there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your fingertips. Others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager.” With these words Jayaben Desai confronted a man over a foot taller than her in August 1977, and the two-year Grunwick dispute was on. Neil Gore’s We Are the Lions, Mr Manager, a 2016 play revived after last year’s racially-inspired riots and directed by Louise Townsend, arrives on tour to the Brighthelm Centre for two days till November 5. Thereafter it proceeds to Coventry, Shrewsbury, Stockport, other English and at least four Scottish venues (link provided).

Originally written to mark the fortieth anniversary of the ground-breaking dispute, it might be revived for the fiftieth too. At least five of the original picketers attended the two Brighton performances. Though Townsend Theatre Productions are mounting Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists next year, perhaps they can find time to return to this unapologetically agitprop work, straight out of Theatre 784.

Rukmini Sircar takes the role of Desai throughout. Gore himself takes on the roles of Manager Malcolm Alden, in a comic-villain manner, sympathetic left union leader Jack Dromey, panto villain of the right John Gouriet, with fingers in Tory pies, a thuggish policeman and in a clever piece of synching: the voice of director John Ward miced to a photo of him speaking to Gore simultaneously playing Gouriet live with a cod-villain skirl and shades.

In addition, Gore plays the banjo and sings – very well – in a roster of songs from the period he’s also arranged himself; with some backing sound. Songs by Leon Rosselson, Jack Warshaw, Richard Thompson and Don Perrygrove are consummately brought to life here. Karen Tennant’s set is a white linkage of screens with raised lectern and platforms that do duty as desks. There’s impressive mobile grilles that turn the place to the fenced exterior of the factory in North London. Below is a simulacra of pebbles. Placards of the period (‘The People United…’) are suddenly taken up by ten members of Hullabaloo, a local choir whose descanted response to one song is the highlight of the evening. It’s one of many linked, local choirs who join the production when it arrives at their location.

The choir are active in the second half: there’s no danger of this two-hour fifteen show dropping in energy. Indeed it feeds off audience participation. At one late moment we’re asked to turn on our phone torches. Daniella Beattie’s lighting is often impressive in its primaries of red, blue and white: but it’s her video projections and clever integrations with space and even moving actors that nail it as conjuring depths, hinterlands, bleak spaces. Amelie Gore’s produced placards, props and artwork.

Grunwick, a film processing laboratory in Willesden, was initially synonymous with good cheap and fast film-processing, as in Which? Magazine. From August 1976 it became a dark symbol for almost forced-labour into antisocial hours, racial exploitation (“no-one else will employ you”) and bullying. And a two-year strike picket led by a racial, female minority. Traditionally deemed the least ‘troublesome’ and most pliant, they led the longest strike in recent British history. Only in Ireland, at the Dunn’s Stores dispute from 1984 over Apartheid, again led by women, can you find anything comparable. Women at Grunwick were graded and targeted for their speed: 50 years on and think automated assessment of workers in fulfilment centres. If a strike fails, it bears consequences down the decades. But even in failure, there’s success.

The two-hander proceeds after a lengthy exposition in film projection splicing original film footage including discussion of racial integration with Jonathan Miller quizzing Enoch Powell; and other disturbing period racisms. It’s intercut with 2024 riots, footage of Tommy Robinson and 2025 marches for Englishness, that attracted 150,000 in London in September. Parallels are clear. Grunwick saw a volte-face from unions who backed Powell in 1968: during the dispute the Indian women garnered support from (for instance) an almost all-white postal workforce in Cricklewood who refused to handle Grunwick sacks, leaving them at the depot (a dastardly raid by well-connected agitators of NAF led by Gouriet was designed to foil this). Grunwick’s legacy was promoting a socialised integration at work level never seen before. That’s something that hasn’t vanished. But the over-lengthy footage reminds us people have returned to identarian fright, marching for “Englishness” against their English neighbours.

There’s nothing subtle about Gore’s play. The dispute and most male characters are daubed in primary colours: shades of blue meanie, down to the Boy in Blue, an apocalyptic policeman whose sense of order extends to the universal peace of post-nuclear annihilation (images project as Gore sings of a policeman’s nuclear lot). Nevertheless Gore himself and Sircar are lively and convincing. Sircar opens, indeed closes with reflections on Desai’s past in Tanzania, where she moved in childhood; and from which Asians were forcibly expelled in the 1960s. After a brief return to India, Mr Desai followed by Desai herself in 1968, made this drizzly country home. Tennant provides glowing backdrop colours as Sircar weaves the light of unforgotten suns.

The arc from 1976’s highs, mass support, union solidarity and picketing – including many miners – gives way to Grunwick’s tricks. Briefly told, the picket’s reduced to six at any one time by a dubious ruling. The TUC advises joining APEX Union, with others long banned by Grunwick. And it refers everyone to ACAS, the arbitration service that Grunwick too reject. Again the TUC and hands-off government place faith in an Enquiry, led by Lord Scarman. It finds in their favour but uniquely, is ignored by CEO George Ward. Ultimately the figure of Desai on hunger strike haunts this production. She never entirely regained her health. Dromey wrote her obituary in 2010.

Rapid videographic shifts are deployed but, for the most part, lightly. The set aids storytelling and escalation; initially in Desai’s stand-offs with the unpleasant Alden. It morphs to characters invoked above. Moments of audience participation arise from both actors: Gore on banjo and Sircar proudly declaiming. Sircar clinches the part, deploying energy and integrity over two halves. Gore is a consummate singer and modulates his voice to sympathetic characters – even if he refuses to restrain the panto. Vocally Ward is the softest-spoken, oozing privilege, then the police constable, bully Alden and oleaginous Gouriet. His Dromey’s a relief.

In a play where each venue provides different challenges and a fresh choir, Townsend and Gore have created a durable, flexible and above all it seems, remarkably consistent production. That the heterogenous moving parts work as well as they do is down to Townsend’s helming skill, and Gore’s more immediate organising.

“A person like me, I am never scared of anybody,” Desai riposted to the managers. For someone who claimed her English wasn’t very good, Desai produced as her colleague Dromey said, some of the most magically poetic words in the language of trade disputes. Words that inspired 100 workers – half the workforce –  to walk out of intolerable conditions at least as bad as Amazon today. In many ways, enforced overtime and low pay were even worse. Desai campaigned in poetry, and she lived it in driving rain and two bitter winters. She never surrendered to the prose of “there’s no alternative”: the capitalist realism drenching workers’ representation over 50 years.

At a time of racialised targeting – a distraction technique born of the very forces Desai fought – Grunwick speaks with startling relevance. If you want rousing theatre that speaks to our working conditions, look no further, even to its rough edges and not wholly integrated updates. Though not the only play about Grunwick – Waking/Walking by Suhayla El-Bushra, part of the NW trilogy, premiered at the Kiln in 2021 – this play has become universally beloved, and in spirit is close to Desai’s struggle.

Assistant Producer Rosie Gunn, Technical Manager Mick Andrew.

Published November 6, 2025November 6, 2025 by Simon Jenner