Playwright Kefi Chadwick on Any Means Necessary at Nottingham Playhouse

photo: Dave Parry

What can audiences expect from Any Means Necessary?
It draws from stories about undercover police officers who had relationships with women while in their undercover personas – some of them long-term relationships, living with them for seven years, having children – and I really wanted to write about that. Mark Kennedy is the most famous of them all – his unmasking led to the realisation that this had been going on for thirty years across the country – and was based in Nottingham.

I wanted to write about it, and Nottingham Playhouse were interested in doing a play about it, so we met on this common ground. The story takes place in two timeframes, the first is in 2012 and is about a parliamentary hearing from the women across thirty years, some of which is verbatim material from a committee selected during that time.

The other story is the narrative that runs across the whole play, which is from 2004 up to 2011, and that’s the story of one woman’s relationship with an officer. It’s the world of that – an activist, the officer, his handler and their relationship. I don’t know how you’d define it: it’s political and personal, it’s an incredibly messed-up love story, while also being a story of political and institutional abuse of women by the police.

How much of the play draws from the Ratcliffe-on-Soar case?
For the central characters, I’ve talked to a lot of the women involved, but obviously they want to preserve their anonymity. They’ve had terrible abuse perpetrated on them, and they don’t want that to be their defining characteristic for the rest of their lives. So the characters are fictional, but draw from all the women I’ve spoken to, and from different cases. But it’s coming to Nottingham Playhouse, it is set in Nottingham and does build to the Ratcliffe action when 114 activists were arrested in Iona school hall in April 2009.

What first got you interested in these cases of police corruption?
I read about Mark Kennedy in The Guardian, in 2012. I'm really interested in where political and personal meet. Female stories and ideas of betrayal interest me – particularly intimate, personal betrayal and political, social betrayal. It ticked every box, but I didn't want to write the play unless I had the women’s approval and cooperation because I felt they had been exploited enough. I wanted to give them a voice – a voice to people who have been silenced in some way. It’s unbelievable.

If you look at the Pitchford inquiry, it’s starting now and it's going to run for three, maybe four years. There are hundreds of core participants, all of whom have either definitely been spied on or there is strong evidence to suggest they have. They’re all good people trying to do a positive thing, none of them are people you could say, “Yeah, I can see why they might have been a target.” They're all a force for good and they're all being undermined by the police.

Jo Dockey (Abby - Cara) and Mel Sissons (Kate)

So it wasn’t about finding groups committing supposedly illegal activities?
It’s nothing to do with being illegal. That was never their remit. It was always intelligence gathering. Some of the women that were spied on withdrew from politics during the time they were in these relationships, and the relationships carried on. None of them were violent, none of them put people’s lives at risk, none of them did anything except maybe a little bit of trespassing – which is actually a civil, not criminal thing. You're not talking about criminals in any way, shape or form.

Do you think it’s been damaging to the activism scene?
It's interesting because I think it has, but also what’s been brilliant is the eight women uniting and taking this case. It's a huge piece of activism and it’s been massively successful. What the women have done in terms of pushing and refusing to back down – taking it to parliament, making parliament listen, making Theresa May listen and forcing the Pitchford inquiry – is that they’ve done one of the biggest, most significant pieces of activism possible.

In a way, what they tried to do by destroying dissent has actually led to a unification of different groups who are pushing for change in this politically active world. It's turned it all on its head. You have these eight women, and they’ve gone against the Met and brought it down. That says something about the power of the individual in the extraordinary.

Is transparency the way to help prevent police corruption in the future?
One of the reasons this happened is because there was no transparency with the units, so the units had no outside eye on them – no one knew what was going on. The trouble is, if they don’t have any outside scrutiny, they become ultimately self-serving and they also become extreme in their behaviour.

You don’t have to have public transparency, nobody’s saying that there isn’t a role for undercover policing, of course there is, but there’s no role for abusing human rights. There’s no role for having relationships and there’s no role for institutions covering up their own wrongdoing, spying on people who are trying to reveal what they’ve been up to.

Did any of the women you talked to speculate about why they’d been targeted by the undercover police?
A lot of the women were well-placed within groups. They were well-trusted, well-liked and part of a number of significant movements. What’s interesting is that the one woman we know who was undercover didn’t have relationships, and the police actually sent up a pretend boyfriend for her twice to preserve her cover so she didn’t need to have a relationship with an activist. If they can do that for the women why can't they do that for the men? That, to me, is the most telling bit of institutional sexism.

Have you been concerned about balancing responsibility to the real-life individuals with creating a piece of art?
Three women I’ve worked very closely with have read drafts of the play as I’ve gone along, so I was always very conscious. They’ve been amazing. They’re like, “We know what you’re trying to do and why you’re trying to do it, and we trust you.” When I sent the first draft of the play I was quite nervous and they said, “No, we love it. We absolutely love it”. They're also consumers of theatre, so they understand what it is to have a good evening in the theatre – you have to make something appealing. They’re fantastic characters to draw from – really magnetic, powerful, interesting women. I was lucky.

Some of the women visited the actors in rehearsal – how was that?
We spent the whole day with the women and it was transformative for their understanding of their characters – where they come from, and how they can develop backstory. What an opportunity for them to talk to those women and to hear their stories and the nuances of it, and then be able to use that to inform their character development. I think we're going to have some very powerful performances on stage.

Any Means Necessary premieres at Nottingham Playhouse on Friday 5 February 2016.

Nottingham Playhouse website