After arriving in Birmingham from St Kitts in 1960, actor Tyrone Huggins gave his first performance as a 9 year old at the now demolished Bloomsbury Street junior school in Nechells. Now, he is back on stage in his home city at Birmingham Rep in To Move in Time, developed by Tyrone and the pioneering theatre group, Forced Entertainment.

“I cemented my early love for acting at Duddeston Manor Comprehensive (now Heartlands Academy), where I performed in some 21 plays as well as being in the first Birmingham Youth Theatre play, The Fire King, about Matthew Boulton & James Watt” says Huggins “it was an exciting moment when the play was reviewed by The Evening Mail in 1972!”.

His roots in the city have remained his inspiration throughout his career; “Birmingham became a focus for some of my earliest playwrighting. And continues to be a focus for my aesthetic exploration.”

As a teenager, Tyrone worked with his father on the British Leyland Longbridge site; “I appreciate the city’s manufacturing past. But I am dismayed how often Birmingham’s history gets erased by the bulldozer.

“Most recently the Wholesale market. And the threat to The Old Rep and Electric Cinema. I used to work on the old Bull Ring outdoor market for a few years from 15 to 18 years old. The market has been at the heart of the city for 800 plus years."

“My university degree is in Metallurgy, so I feel close to those engineers of Birmingham’s past, and their potential for its future. I believe the creative industries walking alongside its manufacturing industries would be a unique and powerful combination in the country.”

Birmingham’s creative industries is where Tyrone has found space to develop his career in the arts. After studying at university and co-founding Impact Theatre Cooperative, a touring company in Leeds, Tyrone returned to Birmingham to perform at The Rep in the classic Of Mice & Men in 1990 and has performed in over ten productions at the city centre theatre since, including in his own play The Honey Man in 2015. He became a board member for The Rep from 1999 to 2005.

Tyrone’s return to The Rep sees him performing a one man show about the possibility of travelling through time. “In 2018, whilst I was performing in a show called Black Men Walking in Sheffield Tim Etchells, Forced Entertainment’s Artistic Director, invited me to collaborate with him and the company on an idea he had about time travel. He shared some sample text that we discussed and I found it fascinating. We agreed a schedule for him to complete the script, sharing it as it grew. We rehearsed and opened the show in February 2019. And I’ve enjoyed the immense challenge of performing it ever since.”

“To Move In Time is a thought experiment. What would life be like if you could travel in time? What kind of person would you be? What kind of person would I be if I could go back in time, or forward and change a detail here or intervene in a friends life there? It is a simple idea that leads to a tangled world of moral, intellectual and comic choices.

“The show is beguiling, in that it entices the audience to follow a train of thought where their own choices in life are brought to mind and they find themselves in an elliptical present. It’s a show in which I talk to them continuously for an hour. A lot happens in that hour. Tim’s writing is subtle and complex. The richness of the show is in its  language. It’s a challenge to learn and to perform.”

Since its premiere in 2019 To Move In Time has toured around the UK twice, visited the Edinburgh Festival and played internationally in Rio, Brazil, Denmark and Japan. The performances at The Rep will be the only shows in the UK this year before heading to Hannover in Germany. “It’s a show I hope to be doing every now and then for a long time.”

“I am really looking forward to performing it in Birmingham. I’d love some of my old school friends to come along to see it and looking forward to sharing it with family, theatre goers and the general public, who will be astounded by what can be achieved by a single actor onstage.”

To Move In Time is at Birmingham Rep Thursday 23 – Friday 24 May. Tickets at birmingham-rep.co.uk