Big Dreams

Tom Wells' The Kitchen Sink is a play about a struggling working-class family living in a fading seaside town in the north of England and trying to realise their dreams for a better life. They also just happen to have a kitchen sink that keeps malfunctioning. Dad Martin is facing the loss of his job as his business delivering milk fails; Kath, the mum, is a dinner lady; and kids Billy and Sophie are trying to achieve their career ambitions with uncertain success. Meanwhile Pete, played by Tim Ross in Red Stitch's production, is a shy, love-struck plumber who is called in to fix the sink.

The setting isn't a million miles away from works like Look Back In Anger or Saturday Night & Sunday Morning, part of a British tradition of gritty realist drama that Wells admires. “I love kitchen sink drama, especially A Taste Of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, so I wanted to write something that was a bit like that. I'm not sure I quite managed it, but that was the starting point.”

Wells is known for bringing a certain 'relish for eccentricity', as The Guardian puts it, to his work, and The Kitchen Sink is no exception. What sounds like a worthy plot is much less serious in the telling. Ross, who was last seen at Red Stitch in hard-hitting two-hander Howie The Rookie, is quick to point out that as well as being touching it's actually a extremely funny play. Rehearsing has even proved tricky because the cast keep cracking up. “We've been struggling to hold it together a lot of the time because it's so funny. It's a very entertaining piece.”

It's the first time that up-and-coming playwright Wells has had one of his plays staged in Australia, and he's delighted that audiences here will have a chance to see it. The play draws heavily on his own life: “It is quite autobiographical, but in a bit of a mixed up way. I think you maybe can't write about a family without writing about your own family so there is a lot of my Mum and Dad in Kath and Martin, there's a little bit of my sister in Sophie and I think Billy's quite a lot like me.” Writing about characters in mundane circumstances comes naturally to him, he points out dryly. “I just write about what I know really. Drinking tea. Worrying. There hasn't been much glamour as yet.”

The fictional setting of Withernsea is based on Wells' hometown in Yorkshire. “There aren't many opportunities there, but at the same time it has real warmth, the people living there are funny and normal and there's always the sea and these big, big skies.” It's a description that's not unfamiliar to Ross, who hails from South Australia. “I come from Adelaide, and there are places there [which are similar].” His mum's hometown of Wallaroo springs to mind, along with many other country towns on the water. Wells says, “It feels to me like the play could only be set in Withernsea, but I think probably there are similar places everywhere. It's the sort of place you can dream big dreams and imagine a better life for yourself. Hopefully everyone does that, not just in Withernsea.”