IT has been a show like no other for Belfast-born actor Mark Dugdale, who never knows who will be waiting by the stage door after each curtain call of multi-award-winning Come From Away.
The critically acclaimed musical theatre hit, based on the lives of some of the 7,000 stranded air passengers in the small town of Gander in Newfoundland in the wake of 9/11, opens in Belfast tomorrow as part of a new Britain and Ireland tour.
And, in many of the cities visited so far, Dugdale – originally from Andersonstown – says people in the audience who had been passengers on some of the 38 grounded planes forced to land in Gander on September 11 2001 couldn’t wait to speak to cast members after the show.
“It has been totally surreal,” says Dugdale, who performed in the (now closed) London West End production, along with Belfast-born musical theatre star, Rachel Tucker.
“After one show in Leeds, a Belfast man who had been in the audience, stayed behind to tell me that he and his wife had been on one of those planes diverted to Gander – a town which saw its population literally double overnight.
“They had been brought to the Salvation Army - my Gander bus driver character takes a lot of the passengers there when they are allowed off the planes. Then, just last week, when the show was in Dublin, I met a lovely woman who had been part of the Aer Lingus cabin crew flying from Dublin to New York when it was also diverted mid-air.
“She told me she had comforted the real-life Hannah (O’Rourke) - one of the key characters in Come From Away - who was worried for her firefighter son in New York. You forget sometimes that the people we play on stage are real people who went through all this.”
Their ordeal, due to American airspace being shut down immediately after the terror attacks on the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center, left pilots, air crew and passengers all relying on the hospitality of the people of Gander for five days.
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Churches, charities and residents rallied to the cause, providing accommodation, food, travel and clothing for the ‘come from aways’. School bus drivers, in the middle of a strike, laid down their picket signs and worked around the clock, ferrying passengers to various shelters.
This kindness, widely acknowledged as being above and beyond any perceived national call of duty, prompted Canadian writers Irene Sankoff and David Hein to begin work on a script on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, beginning with hundreds of interviews with the real people at the centre of the story.
“The show just took on a life of its own and, after opening in Canada, soon transferred to Broadway, Dublin and London,” says Dugdale, who has appeared in numerous West End productions including Jersey Boys, We Will Rock You and The Commitments.
“I am so excited that Come From Away is coming to Belfast – I think local people will just get it; when it comes down to it, we are really good-natured here and that is what the people of Gander were like. It sounds cheesy, but the show really does give your mind and soul a reset and makes you realise that deep down, people are really great. It makes you believe in humanity, above all else.”
It is also very funny, he says – something the audience may not expect, along, perhaps, with some puzzlement over the cast’s “strange Irish accents”.
“I knew nothing about Gander before this show,” explains the actor, a recipient of the Kenneth Branagh Renaissance Award who trained at the Guildford School of Acting in Surrey and later the Irish Film Actors Studio, Dublin. “But, what really struck me was the discovery that at one point in its history, Newfoundland was 50 per cent Irish – and the accent has just kind of stuck. People in the audience will be going, ‘What kind of accent is that? It’s kind of Irish but kind of not...’ It’s very bizarre.”
There are no ‘leads’ as such in Come From Away – another departure from the normal structure of a musical show – and the 12 cast members share the limelight equally and all “multi-role”.
Dugdale’s main character is a plane passenger called Kevin (who is in a relationship with his travelling companion, also called ‘Kevin’), but, in addition, he plays the part of Gander bus driver, Garth - as well as a sombre-sounding, disembodied President Bush.
“I just speak as President Bush, addressing passengers on the plane through the airwaves,” he says. “I love that wee part, but my main one is playing one of the ‘Kevins’ who are both ‘come from aways’ [the term used by Newfoundlanders to describe visitors or people living but not born in the province].
“My ‘Kevin’ gets really taken aback by just how amazing the people are in Gander and it kind of resets him a bit and makes him re-evaluate his life. He goes on to set up a charity called ‘9/11 Pay It Forward’, through which he does random acts of kindness for strangers.”
I am so excited that Come From Away is coming to Belfast – I think local people will just get it; when it comes down to it, we are really good-natured here and that is what the people of Gander were like. It sounds cheesy, but the show really does give your mind and soul a reset and makes you realise that deep down, people are really great. It makes you believe in humanity, above all else
— Mark Dugdale
With kindness the central theme, Dugdale says there has never been a better time for people to come out and see the show. “With everything going on in the world right now, people need this show,” he says.
“I think it reminds us a little of what a lot of us felt during the Covid pandemic – a time when people went the extra mile and started to look out for each other more and check in on their neighbours without expecting anything in return.
“The reaction from audiences continues to astound me – I have never experienced anything like it. It gives your heart a wee kind of tweak... a feeling that everything will be alright, you know? Northern Ireland I think is one of those places where this show will have that effect – I think it will really speak to people.”
Finally, he says, be prepared to sit it out – there is no interval. This has been another deliberate part of the production process, mainly as a means of capturing the momentum of that time; the “relentless nature” of what was happening in the air and on the ground, and the desperate need to “keep going”.
“You have to remember, people didn’t sleep for five days,” adds Dugdale, “so there was a need to reflect that to theatre audiences. People will love it, but make sure to use the lavatories first. The show won’t stop and you will be grounded.”
