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Olivier-winning theatre maker Jamie Eastlake: 'Northern voices need to be heard'
Award-winning theatre maker Jamie Eastlake is taking his play Gerry & Sewell to the West End. He writes about his journey to this point and why northern and working-class voices need to be heard
by: Jamie Eastlake
25 Jan 2026
Gerry & Sewell on the West End. Image: Meg Jepson
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It’s been ten weeks since I signed my first West End contract. Ten weeks’ lead time. The show opens this week.
A theatre producer who’d never produced on the country’s biggest stages. Proper theatre land. The kind your grandma used to visit once a year with the rest of the amateur operatics, on an overnight coach organised by her pal Brenda.
“You’re absolutely mad.”
“What – ten weeks? Christmas in the middle? And a January limited run?”
“Nah, sorry, we can’t help. It’s impossible.”
Just some of the responses I got as I dared to ask people who’d been there and done it.
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I’ve had a fruitful 16-year career making theatre. Mostly on the fringes. Developing new writing. Pushing talent through. And every year, battling crippling self-doubt and the permanent scarcity of my bank balance.
“People like us… it’s not meant for people like us. The working classes.”
That’s what my mam said in 2019, when I moved back into my childhood bedroom – on the verge of bankruptcy, diagnosed with severe depression.
But this one was different. I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t take this opportunity. A West End run. Of a show I started making four years ago in a tiny room above an old Buffs club in North Tyneside.
This had to happen.
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“Impossible is nothing.”
Why did it have to happen? Because I wanted to prove it could be done. That a working-class bloke, living as far from theatre land as you can get in England, could make a play in a tiny room—and within five years, get it to the West End.
I had to do it for that. I had to do it for the twenty-year-old lad in the Big Smoke, working in small-scale theatres, polishing his accent and wearing tweed suits just to fit in. Because that’s what theatre was. That’s what theatre wanted.
Nah. I learned that when I came home to the North East. What audiences wanted was to be heard. They wanted to hear their voices. To feel seen. And to just bloody escape all of this shite right now.
Gerry & Sewell opened in 2022 to sold-out audiences at Laurels – a 60-seater theatre I set up with my pal Steve. It came back for another three weeks and sold out again.
“We’re onto something here. This looks possible.”
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Then it transferred to Live Theatre – the home of Pitmen Painters and the birthplace of work by Lee Hall, Shelagh Stephenson, and Peter Straughan. It sold out there too.
“Everyone must be mad. Are we mad?”
Then, in 2024, it went to the theatrical Mecca of the North East: the Theatre Royal. No show had ever made that journey from such humble beginnings.
Turned around in no time at all.
“Here’s a slot. It’s in three months.”
Easy. “Lynn, how many Black and White Flags can you lend me?”
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It’s an underdog story. That’s the heart of the play. People scrapping. Chasing a dream.
“Hope, man. Sewell.”
It’s about football – but it’s not really. Replace the season tickets the characters are chasing with any other form of escapism and the feeling is the same. The drive is the same. That universal pull is why it’s about to stand at the top of the Strand, adorned in black and white.
But it’s the voices – the voices that are never heard on these stages, on our screens – that make it matter.
The tweed suits are gone. It’s Stone Island and black and white stripes now. And the audiences it was made for, in that tiny room, are still at the forefront of our minds in rehearsals.
It’s still the same play. Just with a bit bigger budget. Because working-class voices need to be heard. Northern voices need to be heard.
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“Yeah, you’re right—I’m absolutely mad. It does feel impossible. But it’s worth it. Because our stories deserve to be told.”
Jamie Eastlakeis an Olivier-winning theatre maker from Blyth in the North East of England.
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