Bargains, Benevolence and Bandwagons: Steve Gilroy on Hand Me Down

Bargains, Benevolence and Bandwagons: Steve Gilroy on Hand Me Down

09 June, 2011
by: Naima Khan

Naima Khan talks to Steve Gilroy about the Edinburgh hit Hand Me Down so to run in London's Tristan Bates Theatre. 

Technically, is the UK still in recession? Because it seems like everyone is still bargain hunting. And we've become really good at it. The charity shop secrets are out and thanks to Mary Portas and the return of retro chic, second-hand shopping is pretty much the new black. In fact the active consumer will tell you that the newest things aren’t the most valuable and charity shops have come to mean much more than a good bargain. In her rather epic one-woman-show, Hand Me Down, Kate Craddock takes stock of who shops at second-hand stores and why.

In the noise-polluted dungeons of Spoonfed Towers, I attempt to phone director Steve Gilroy who tells me why the Edinburgh hit Hand Me Down has become a lot more relevant than he could have hoped. “For our parents” he says, “charity shops were functional and economic above anything else, with the added bonus of spending your money where it can do something good. At one time, having the newest thing was what it was all about. My gran, for example, had loads of interesting furniture which she replaced with the most modern thing she could get, even if it was bland. To her, having something new made it valuable. We don't perceive things in that way. In some ways second hand stuff has added value because it has a kind of provenance. Particularly if it hasn't started life in a Chinese clothing factory.”

For Kate, the creator of Hand Me Down, second-hand clothes were an inevitability. “Her motivation was a very personal one” says Steve “she grew up on hand me downs. She’d see something on a cousin or a sister and know that eventually, she’d be wearing it. That part of her childhood, getting new things, wasn't as exciting as she'd have liked it to be.”

But to the contrary, the world that Kate creates on stage takes her audience through decades and across continents in a colossal one-woman-show that stays true to its content. “Everything from the show has been bought from a charity shop” explains Steve, “every item without exception. And so each one carries its own story including its own characters.”

Though a lot of things are dumped unceremoniously at the doors of Cancer Research UK or Oxfam, occasionally you’ll come across an item that completely baffles. Kate, for instance, once found a wedding dress - “What poor bereft bride would bring a wedding dress to a charity shop!?” - In Kate’s mind, it’s a woman whose wedding never happened so there were no children or grandchildren to pass it on to. Steve's point is that it’s sometimes the great changes in people’s lives that bring their possessions into ours; and as Hand Me Down demonstrates, those stories, though born from Kate’s imagination and years of research, have a historical as well as a personal and geographical significance.

The play takes us from a British high street to war-torn Africa through multiple characters and an ambitious plot that embraces the wider implications of second-hand shopping. “A child comes to buy a present for her mother, which sets off a kind of chain reaction that takes us on a journey” says Steve, “Kate has to find a way of immersing herself into all these different characters, from children to missionaries and she moves seamlessly between them. One of her characters is a gap year girl who's trying to get a job in media and pitching lots of charity ideas involving celebrities. Her story touches on this kind of fashionable charity”

While celebrity involvement in charity is generally a good thing, it does hint at the way we see the recipients of our donations. “The play discusses being on the other end of charity as well” continues Steve, “Often we have to characterise people as victims in order to feel good about helping them. 'The poor' have to be portrayed in a certain way in order for people to contribute to their welfare. In a time of austerity, where people need to tighten their belts, anybody who needs something has to be a recipient of charity. A lot of ’helping’ is defined like this.”

Craddock's ambitious play addresses exactly this. From volunteering at charity shops, to shopping in them, who are the people that cross paths with the things we come to own? And what motivates the altruistic things we do?


Hand Me Down runs at Tristan Bates Theatre from 14th June-2nd July

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Naima Khan