Coventry City of Culture Trust has teamed up with the Royal Shakespeare Company to produce a 24-hour-long performance & community project based around the subject of faith.

Promenade performances, community cook-alongs of old family recipes, ‘open house’ events at faith centres, and a final symbolic ceremony by candlelight all feature in the intimate, free-of-charge co-production.

“We started off by thinking about interrogating what we meant by faith in all of its different forms,” explains Chris O’Connell, the Coventry-born writer of two walking-theatre pieces in Faith’s programme. “We began to think about religious faith. We are very much a multi-faith community across Coventry, and it’s integral to leadership within different areas of the city. But we also wanted to think about what else faith could mean. I, for example, don’t follow a particular religious faith. So we wanted to think about humanism in general, which has a lot of the core beliefs of respect, morals and kindness that many religions also resonate with. Then we also wanted to think about having faith in others; in the individual people around us and the wider city itself, especially in the times we’ve been through recently. I think faith very much relates to a secular society, too. If religious faith isn’t for you, then it’s important that you find faith in something else. Without it, it’s very difficult to go forwards.”

Chris’ writing draws on both collective and personal experience: “My first piece, The Messenger, goes back to April 2020 - the real height of the first wave of the pandemic. A young girl’s mum is taken ill, and her dad lives elsewhere for work. She’s not ill with Covid, but she’s still in a really serious condition. Faith definitely comes into play when we think about death approaching and what we expect when we pass from this world, so the mum gives the girl a letter; one which she needs to pass onto her father. The young girl makes contact with her dad, who is struck by the news and also the fact he isn’t really allowed to travel. Nevertheless he’s going to come on the bus and meet her. So she sets out to meet him and sees a whole range of different characters. I guess the classic tenets of Greek drama - where, against all the odds, the messenger completes their task - comes into play here. It’s an odyssey, but it’s also a sharp awakening of young people to the adult world. I’ve really channelled my own experience here, of watching my children deal with the world seeming to collapse around them. I wanted to explore this idea of everything a child knows changing, almost in an instant, and being ripped apart, as I think it was also a pretty collective experience.

“The other piece, The Return, is more my own experience of rites of passage. As a young person, you can rarely wait to get away from the place you were born in, but many people also return. In the piece, there are two characters who haven’t seen each other for 40-odd years and by chance meet on the steps of the cathedral - an iconic building - and begin to unpick everything. They were in a relationship when they were young and haven’t seen each other since, so in a way it’s a love story too. I wanted to delve into what ‘belonging’ means: a different part of faith that makes you stay somewhere, or draws you to a particular place at a certain time.

“The piece also ponders the nature of cities and how they evolve. There’s an ongoing battle for the soul of Coventry. Some people want to knock down certain parts of it, and others don’t want that. New parts get built to move us into the future, but equally do we then lose something of the past?”

Understanding the faith of others plays as much of a part in the programme as considering one’s own: “We’ve really tried to engage all faith communities in the project. We did a lot of initial research and meeting over Zoom, and also met with a lot of the different faith leaders from Coventry. We want to try and tap into all belief systems, and the roles these leaders play in our society. There’s an area down by Harnall Lane roundabout that’s like Coventry’s ‘sacred mile’, where there’s a lot of different places of worship. They all interconnect and talk to one another. But then, equally, this project is still very much for people who aren’t directly part of that. Right at the end of the theatre aspect of Faith, on the Saturday evening as dusk falls, many of the different leaders of Coventry’s religious communities will join together in Millennium Place for audiences to hear from them and light candles together in a show of unity. This really summarises what Coventry City of Culture has been about. It’s about reaching out from the surface level of the city centre, right into the innards of the city, and asking questions. Who are we? What are our roles? How do we all come together?”

This search for the heart of Coventry and its people culminated in walking-theatre pieces: “The promenade aspect of the theatre section of the project definitely spun off from that ‘sacred mile’ I mentioned. But I was also particularly interested in trying to get out of the city centre as much as possible. That idea of faith in each other really resonates with City of Culture, so the act of doing these pieces out on the streets is highly symbolic of that. The idea of everyone rubbing shoulders together, of roaming and moving and sharing and collaborating across all different communities in the city, is really important.”

Faith takes place in Coventry city centre from the evening of Friday 10 t0 the evening of Saturday 11 September. To find out more and book tickets, visit coventry2021.co.uk