by “Don’t get too close to him,” Gaynor Faye tells an actress as she directs rehearsals for The Syndicate, a stage adaptation of Kay Mellor’s TV series about lottery winners. “This is a theater, so open up the space.” We are in a rehearsal room at the Leeds Grand Theatre, and there is a second plastic chair behind her on the table where Faye is sitting for a writer, co-director or producer. . On this show, it is empty, after the sudden death of Mellor at the age of 71 in 2022. His absence would be poignant anyway, but it is more than ever as Mellor’s daughter Faye. In the original plan, Faye would have occupied the second chair as Mellor’s assistant director.
“Mum left a very good first draft of the stage version of The Syndicate,” the director explains over lunch. “I worked on that, using her notes on what she wanted to do in the next draft and going back to the TV scripts and adding some bits that I felt should have been in there .”
It destroys the lives of some of the characters – the audience has to decide if they want to be that rich
Mellor was one of television’s most talented writers, specializing in female-led Yorkshire working-class stories: sex workers in Band of Gold, the women’s football team in Playing the Field, a slimming club in Fat Friends and four series of The Syndicate. . The stage play is based on its first season, when five supermarket workers’ problems – poverty, illness, failed relationships – are not necessarily solved by sharing a £20m pot of gold.
“I think that’s what made Mom so good,” says Faye. “She wanted to give depth and backstory to every character, even the minor ones. We know from the beginning that they are going to win the lottery, but she has set up all these complications. She was interested in how much money you won: what does it give up? It destroys the lives of some characters, but improves others. The audience has to decide if they want to be that rich.”
It’s clear that it’s difficult for Faye to talk about a show so steeped in her grief but, like the show, this interview has a filial duty: “The Guardian was my mother’s paper. She read it every day.”
For the bereaved, memories or mementoes have a double edge: to restore connection but also to emphasize loss. Spending months with her late mother, Faye must face an extreme version of this? “Mmm.” She clears her throat. “Exactly, my father asked us to keep Rollem [Mellor’s production company] going. And from the point of view of this drama, my mother’s legacy is very important to me, so it was a quick decision that we would follow. I thought: ‘Why not do it when my mum was so excited about it?'”
I thought – why not do it when my mum was so excited about it?
Does Faye understand conversations with the writer? “The writer! I always know what she is would not Like, so I’m working on that basis. I don’t really talk to her, but I’m a Buddhist, so I have a picture of her on my head Bhutan [home altar] and I look at her every day as I say prayers for the loved ones who have passed on. So I think about her a lot anyway. And sometimes I think I feel her and direct her. Sometimes people say: ‘I had a real glimpse of your mother there.’ At auditions, sometimes people do a double take. I think I’ve always had their mannerisms, but when that person is gone, I suddenly become that person.”
Three generations of the family are involved in the Syndicate, which will tour the UK: Mellor, Faye, who also plays a lottery company consultant, and Oliver Anthony – Faye’s son – who plays the younger brother of one of the millionaires over night. The city feels very dynamic at the moment: Archie Gray, a full-back in Leeds United’s promotion-chasing team, is the son, grandson and great-nephew of former players for the club. “It must be a Leeds thing!” Faye laughed. “The Grays, the Mellors.”
None of the showbiz families have a surname, however, and not for reasons of women’s identities disappearing in marriage: Faye and Anthony chose to drop Mellor because of the industry’s doubts about professional inheritance. Both appeared in Syndicate on TV, and Faye also in Band of Gold. They are successful in other ways – she in Coronation Street and Emmerdale, and on stage in Calendar Girls; on BBC3’s My Left Nut – but they joke that it might be futile to sweat the trade if you don’t have the blood.
“My mother used to say: ‘Gaynor, if you weren’t good, I wouldn’t hire you!’ But yes, it is a thing. Ollie used the surname Anthony because he saw the ‘nepotism’ stuff people said about me and his Mum. Ollie wanted to do it alone. And it was only at this point that he was willing to ‘come out’ about his connection to me and to ‘Nankay’, as the grandchildren called his mother: Nan Kay. Now he says he wants to be proud to be Kay Mellor’s grandson.”
Faye reveals that neither she nor her son had planned to act in the Syndicate until a last-minute reshuffle when Max George pulled out for medical reasons: “Ollie took over from Max. Ollie did all the original workshops, and worked a lot with my mother as an actor and writer. But when it comes to casting in the theatre, some ‘names’ are needed in the main roles. So Ollie graciously let the part go to someone else. And then we agreed to stand in when we had a problem.”
The names sought by theater producers for regional tours are usually followed by publicity posters with so-called television brackets. Samantha Giles has “(Emmerdale)”, Brooke Vincent “(Coronation Street)”, as well as Faye stints in each. “There is snobbery about this,” she says. “But soap actors are great. It’s relentless, it’s a machine, and they’re great at continuing to do it and keeping it fresh: 13 scenes a day and then go home to learn the 13 for tomorrow. But in the theater they love having time to explore.”
Five minutes before lunch, the actors discovered some knotty subtext in a scene, and Faye could tell they would spend the first part of the evening exploring it: “That could never happen in television. It was a practice record. But now, especially in soaps, it’s just a record.”
Can you imagine what the story would be like if our team won the lottery?
When Faye played Judy Mallett in Coronation Street in the 1990s, there were around 20 million viewers, and up to 7 million viewers saw her as Megan in Emmerdale two decades later. Now the shows are lucky to reach 3 million. “It’s sad. I was lucky to be in the glory days. But I think there’s so much choice now, and people have binge boxes and streamers, so they’re not sitting down every day of the week at the same time. People have such busy lives. And of course I hope some people aren’t watching a soap because they’re coming to the theatre!”
However, she finds that the home medium influences the away one: “Sometimes people talk in the auditorium because they’ve experienced Gogglebox and chat while watching. With Calendar Girls, there were a few places – I won’t say which ones – where people were on their phones in the stalls saying: ‘Mum, I’m watching her on TV!’ And we were standing on stage thinking: ‘Oh my God!’ All you have to do is keep going and think: ‘It’s the beauty of live theatre.’ And we’re going to those theaters again on this tour.”
The obvious final question: is the entire team playing the lottery as a syndicate? “No! But yes, we must. Can you imagine what the story would be if we won? But we will do it. I will buy each of the cast a raffle ticket as a first night present.”
• At Leeds Grand 18-28 April, then UK tour
