Glitch: The Post Office Scandal - Northern Arts Review
RABBLE Theatre at the Cast Doncaster
Glitch: The True Story of the Post Office Scandal - Northern Arts Review
I’m going to be brutally honest with you. For the better part of a decade, the Post Office scandal occupied a very specific and slightly shameful corner of my attention. You know the one: the corner reserved for things you register, acknowledge as terrible, and then set aside in favour of a distracting Instagram reel. Every year or so, it taps on your shoulder with a headline or a snippet on the radio. With each story, you get the vague sense that something slow and grinding and genuinely awful is happening to a group of people who ran corner shops and village post offices. Moments later, it’s just a faint bit of white noise at the edges of your life.
I’ve thought about why that is, and I think there’s something specific to the texture of this particular injustice that makes it too easy to shrug off. Sub-postmasters aren’t a glamorous group and accounting software isn’t a glamorous subject. The infrastructure of everyday life is invisible by design. We just want it to function. And when it breaks, it still isn’t dramatic in the way we’ve been trained to attend to. No explosions or villains twirling moustaches. Just a computer that keeps producing the wrong numbers, and an institution that decides to destroy the humans instead of the machines. It shouldn’t be easy to look away from that. And yet…
But Glitch doesn’t let us off easy. It doesn’t pat us on the shoulder and tell us it’s okay to “protect our peace”. It’s exactly the kind of confronting theatre this story deserves.
RABBLE Theatre, the Reading-based company founded by Toby and Dani Davies in 2012, has been telling local stories of national significance since their earliest site-specific productions in the Reading Abbey ruins. Glitch, written by Zannah Kearns with dramaturgy from Beth Flintoff, is their first major national tour, supported by £85,000 from Arts Council England. It tells the true story of Pam Stubbs, sub-postmistress of Barkham for over twenty years, who took over the branch the day after her husband died and ran it alone until a glitch in the Horizon IT system began producing fictitious shortfalls. But the Post Office met its match in Pam. She fought back with handwritten records matching every receipt with the till’s transaction log. She refused to simply absorb the losses and move on, as so many other sub-postmasters were forced to do, and her evidence in the Bates v Post Office case was pivotal. The production was developed in direct collaboration with Pam as well as other affected sub-postmasters, and legal professionals involved in the fight. It is this proximity to those who lived through this gut-wrenching ordeal that shines through and gives this production a sense of authenticity that burns like a wound.
To see my full review, please visit Northern Arts Review
See you in the shadows my loves,
Sean x
