In West End terms it was a most unlikely success story. The transfer to Shaftesbury Avenue introduced The Big Life – and the story of the Windrush – to massive new audiences who were delighted by its warmth and energy.

The story of The Big Life is closely based on Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour's Lost, with the setting switched to 1950s London. A group of men coming over to London on the Windrush agree to swear off women for three years in order to concentrate on making a good start in their new home – by studying, getting a job and making some money to send back to their families. But however good their intentions, of course, it’s not that easy…

“Kyan wait to get to Inglan – Wi mek it big in a Inglan!” they sing. They arrive in London brimming with optimism. “I’m going to make something of myself – the sky’s the limit!” The reality they find is discrimination, a lack of decent work – even work for which they’re hugely over-qualified – and grisly weather. At least there’s “plenty of jobs on the buses”, which is where both Bernie and Leonard end up working.

But they find such weird people in London! “Every minute them drinking tea, the English. When them happy, they have tea. When them sad, they have tea…”

Finally, it should be pointed out that with tea and buses and the Windrush, not to mention a lot of business with a Bible that gets thrown around, and references to Tweedle-dee and “mad as a hatter”, this is a show with a very high Icons quotient!

ICONS talks to The Big Life writer, Paul Sirett

First of all, where did the idea for the show come from?

Well, the brief history goes something like this: at Stratford East they’ve been running a musical theatre course for several years now, to encourage writers and musicians to come together to write new musicals for the theatre. About five years ago Philip Hedley [former artistic director at Stratford East] invited me to write a ten-minute piece with one of the course graduates for a showcase that was being done. I felt that writing a ten-minute piece was really difficult but rather cheekily said I did have an idea for a full-length piece: a ska musical based on Love’s Labour's Lost. To Philip Hedley’s credit, he said, “Well, go ahead – let’s see what you can do".

We did a workshop of scenes: we did the opening scene on the boat; and there was the scene where the two women seduce Lennie and a scene in the second act with the song called You Do It, where the men finally crumble and pay off their bet to the Admiral. We had a go at a couple of scenes from that and it just worked, and it became a full commission. Then we did another workshop of the whole thing and a presentation of that. It took about four years to get it to the stage.

Where did the idea to use Love’s Labour's Lost come from?

I first read Love’s Labour's Lost many years ago when I was at school – it was on the curriculum, for some reason, as “Shakespeare’s Comedy”. It’s not very funny, but there it was…

So some good came out of someone reading the book at school. A first, possibly…

I thought at the time that it was a great premise for a musical (not a revolutionary thought that a Shakespeare play might be the basis of a good musical!) but I didn’t do anything. At the time I was playing in reggae and ska bands and it was a case of putting those two ingredients together. I just thought, “a ska musical and Love’s Labour's Lost…"

Then the question was, “How the hell do you do this – and who’s the musical going to be about, where are you going to set it, when are you going to set it?” I actually started off trying to write a contemporary piece; I knew right from the very start that I wanted the piece to be about immigrants because for me that ups the stakes in terms of what those men want. Immigrants going to a new country are often going to be aspirant and they’re going to be the ones who suffer privations to try and make their way in life.

If you write something about somebody coming to a new country – OK, I’m going to really make something of myself, I’m going to wipe the slate clean or whatever, I can just make my mark here – that’s something that I think appeals to all of us; the idea of sitting down and really trying to make something of ourselves.

But I tried to set it in the contemporary world and it flatly refused to work – the music didn’t have a lot to do with, say, Eastern European economic migrants; it just didn’t sit very easily. And so then I started thinking about the music and it was the music that suggested to me – well, hang on a minute, a ska musical… Early ska and calypso came to this country with what was really the first major wave of West Indian immigration after the war, in the late-1940s, early-1950s. And when I started to put those ideas together it clicked – it was one of those things, it just made perfect sense. It worked for those people, at that time, with that music, and with that story – and so that’s how all those ingredients came together.

What sort of research did you have to do into the period and the lives of the people who were on the boat?

A lot of research had to be done, because it had to be authentic. I was in the very good position of working with Clint Dyer, the director, and his family were of that generation. His parents had come over at that time and I spent a lot of time talking to them and some of the stories in the show are directly from stories that his mum and dad told me.
For example, the story about the banana in the shop was one that his dad told me: he would go into a shop and always get given the second-best things. They would go and get something from round the back, as opposed to giving him the nice stuff in the window.

I talked to them a lot and obviously I did plenty of reading and watching documentaries and stuff like that. But a lot of the research side of it for me came through the workshops we were doing – for the actors this was their parents’ story, and quite a lot of the parents had never spoken to their children about what had happened when they came over. They’d kind of pulled up the drawbridge and didn’t want to talk about it – so it opened the floodgates really. It was so interesting that this was a subject that hadn’t been talked about that much, even within those families. For Paul [Joseph, the composer] it was his family as well, and Jenny [Tiramani, the designer] and I just kind of soaked it all up.

The appeal to audiences is partly to do with people having a very direct connection – it’s the children of the Windrush generation and the audiences are enraptured. You can see there’s a very direct, lively kind of engagement with it.

I think it’s very engaging and oddly it’s not a story that we’ve seen, in a way. I think there have been quite a few attempts at doing a Windrush thing, but not told in this way. It’s entertaining and, I think, very humane as well.

A national tour is planned for The Big Life, so keep an eye out...