‘Don’t get too close in to him,” Gaynor Faye tells an actor as she directs rehearsals of The Syndicate, a stage adaptation of Kay Mellor’s TV series about lottery winners. “This is theatre, so open up the space.” We’re in a rehearsal room at Leeds Grand theatre, and the table where Faye sits – ringbound script, pencils, reusable water bottle – has behind it a second plastic chair traditionally placed in a rehearsal room 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. Her absence would be poignant anyway, but it’s even more so as Faye is Mellor’s daughter. In the original plan, Faye would have occupied that second chair as assistant director to Mellor.
“Mum left a very good first draft of the stage version of The Syndicate,” the director explains during lunch. “I’ve 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 I felt should be in.”
Mellor was one of the most talented TV writers, specialising in female-led stories of the Yorkshire working class: sex workers in Band of Gold, a 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, in which the problems of five supermarket workers – poverty, illness, failing relationships – are not necessarily solved by sharing a £20m jackpot.
“I think that’s what Mum did so well,” says Faye. “She wanted to give every character, even small ones, depth and backstory. We know from the start they’re going to win the lottery, but she’s set up all these complications. She was fascinated by what winning that much money did to you: what does it bring up? It ruins some characters’ lives, but improves others. The audience has to decide if they’d want to be that rich.”
A show so entwined with her grief is clearly hard for Faye to talk about but, like the production, this interview is a filial obligation: “The Guardian was my mum’s paper. She read it every day.”
For the bereaved, memories or mementoes have a double edge: restoring connection but also underlining loss. Spending months in a collaboration with her late mother, Faye must face an extreme version of this? “Mmm.” She clears her throat. “Straight away, my dad asked us to keep Rollem [Mellor’s production company] going. And in terms of this play, my mum’s legacy is very important to me, so it was a quick decision that we’d carry on. I thought: ‘Why would we not do it when my mum was so excited about it?’”
Does Faye have a sense of conversations with the writer? “The writer! I always know what she wouldn’t want, so I work on that basis. I don’t actually talk to her, but I’m a Buddhist, so I have a picture of her on my Butsudan [home altar] and I look at her every day when saying prayers for loved ones who have passed on. So I think about her a lot anyway. And sometimes I do think I sense her and channel her. Sometimes people say: ‘I had a real flash of your mum there.’ At auditions, people have sometimes done a double take. I think I always had her mannerisms, but when that person has gone, suddenly I become that person.”
Three generations of the family are involved in The Syndicate, which will tour the UK: Mellor, Faye, who also plays the lottery company adviser, and Oliver Anthony – Faye’s son – who plays the younger brother of one of the overnight millionaires. The city feels very dynastic at the moment: Archie Gray, fullback in Leeds United’s Championship promotion-seeking team, is the son, grandson and great nephew of previous players for the club. “It must be a Leeds thing!” laughs Faye. “The Grays, the Mellors.”
None of the showbiz clan, though, shares a surname, and not for reasons of female identities vanishing in marriage: Faye and Anthony chose to drop Mellor due to industry suspicion of professional inheritance. Both appeared in The Syndicate on TV, and Faye also in Band of Gold. They are otherwise successful – her in Coronation Street and Emmerdale, and on stage in Calendar Girls; him in BBC3’s My Left Nut – but suffer muttering that putting in the sweat in the profession can be futile if you don’t have the blood.
“My mum used to say: ‘Gaynor, if you weren’t any good, I wouldn’t hire you!’ But yeah, it is a thing. Ollie used the surname Anthony because he’d seen the ‘nepotism’ stuff people said about me and Mum. Ollie wanted to do it on his own. And it’s only at this point that he was happy to ‘come out’ about his connection with me and ‘Nankay’, as the grandchildren called mum: Nan Kay. Now he says he wants to be proud of being Kay Mellor’s grandson.”
Faye points out that neither she nor her son planned to act in The Syndicate until a last-minute reshuffle caused by Max George withdrawing for medical reasons: “Ollie has taken over from Max. Ollie did all the original workshops, and he had worked with my mum a lot as an actor and a writer. But when it came to casting in the theatre, you need some ‘names’ in the main roles. So Ollie very graciously let the part go to someone else. And then agreed to step in when we had a problem.”
The names sought by theatre producers for regional tours tend to be followed on publicity posters by what are known as telly brackets. Samantha Giles has “(Emmerdale)”, Brooke Vincent “(Coronation Street)”, in addition to Faye’s stints in each. “There’s snobbery about this,” she says. “But soap actors are fantastic. It’s relentless, it’s a machine, and they’re brilliant at keeping doing it and keeping it fresh: 13 scenes a day and then going home to learn the 13 for tomorrow. But in theatre they love having time to explore.”
Five minutes before lunch, the actors discovered some knotty subtext in a scene, and Faye was able say they would spent the first part of the afternoon exploring it: “That could never happen in TV. It used to be rehearse-record. But now, especially in soaps, it’s just record.”
When Faye played Judy Mallett in Coronation Street in the 1990s, the audience was around 20 million, while 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 very fortunate to be in the glory days. But I think there’s so much choice now, and people binge box sets and streamers, so they just aren’t going to be sitting down every day of the a week at the same time. People have such busy lives. And obviously I hope some people aren’t watching soaps because they’re coming to the theatre!”
She finds, though, that the home medium influences the away one: “Sometimes people talk in the auditorium because they’re used to Gogglebox and chatting while watching. With Calendar Girls, there were a couple of venues – I won’t say which – where people were on their phones in the stalls saying: ‘Mum, I’m watching her off the telly!’ And we were standing on stage thinking: ‘Oh my God!’ You just have to carry on and think: ‘It’s the beauty of live theatre.’ And we’re going to those theatres again on this tour.”
The obvious final question: is the cast all playing the lottery as a syndicate? “We haven’t! But yes, we have to. Can you imagine what a story it would be if we won? But we will do it. I’m going to buy each of the cast a lottery ticket as a first-night present.”