10-minute talk with The Flood writer Vickie Donoghue
What is the real-life natural disaster you have dramatised?
“The Flood is about the disaster on a night in 1953, when England was battered by devastating floods and Canvey was completely taken over by water. So many people died as a result – 58 from Canvey alone – and the reverberations are still felt today. You go to Canvey Island and there’s now this enormous seawall, huge, which protects them as a community from the rising sea water flooding.”
Why is this an important piece of Essex history?
“I grew up, I don’t know, 20 minutes from Canvey and I didn’t know this story. I think children from Canvey are taught about it at school, but it’s not much remembered beyond the area and it deserves to be. It’s such a disaster but also a story of courage, and coming together.”
So, there is celebration as well as tragedy in the play?
“Yes. It opens on the night of the opening of the Canvey Island War Memorial Hall, which is also the night of the disaster and a true story. They had a big party, they had a band. I read reports that some of them got so drunk they slept really soundly through the storm and were only woken up because they felt their hand or arm trailing in the water.”
It’s the power of the people that helps Canvey recover, isn’t it?
“At some point after the flood, there was discussion about whether to rebuild or not and the people at the top said, perhaps we should leave it. The people of Canvey, a working class community, were like, absolutely not, it’s our home! This is about community acknowledging and celebrating the past It’s one of those stories that people should feel proud of.”
Who thought of inviting local people to take part in the production?
“It was our director, Stef O’Driscoll, who suggested a community cast of young people for the 1953 scene. We’d already been talking about the cycle of life, so she thought of finding a cast of elderly people from the community as well, for after the interval, when it’s 70 years later.”
