Viva Lewes Issue #146 November 2018

ON THIS MONTH: THEATRE
Kat Francois
Raising Lazarus
It was a chance
comment from her
partner, Rob, which
set performance artist
Kat Francois off on a
journey into the past
that is unlikely to end
any time soon.
“He saw a photo of a
memorial to fallen Grenadians
of the two world wars in a history book.
On it, he could make out the name ‘Francois’.
He said: ‘Any relation?’ ‘Of course not,’ I told
him. ‘I’d have been told about that if he was.’”
“A few months later I asked my gran, who
had come over from Grenada as part of the
Windrush generation, about it. I was amazed
when she said that her father’s first cousin,
Lazarus, had joined up in 1915, and gone to
fight with the British West Indies Regiment. He
was best friends with my great grandfather, who
wanted to go, but wasn’t allowed.”
“I was trying to write a comedy about three
sisters at the time,” continues Kat, “but Lazarus
kept giving me a hard time, and I felt compelled
to write his story, instead.”
Lazarus Francois was transported across the
Atlantic, with thousands of other West Indian
recruits, to be given basic military training in
Seaford. “They were put up in shoddy barracks,
and weren’t given proper uniforms for the conditions,”
says Kat. “Nineteen of them didn’t even
make it through the training period: they died
of illnesses such as pneumonia; you can see their
graves in Seaford.”
The troops – who had joined up, Kat reckons,
out of a sense of patriotism for the British
Empire – came across a good deal of racism,
both personal and
institutional. “They had
to do a lot of the donkey
work: digging trenches,
cleaning latrines, carrying
ammunition,
cooking for the white
soldiers.”
Unfortunately, Lazarus
left no diary, and the
only family trace of his military career Kat came
across, in a research project that took her from
Seaford to New Jersey, was a photograph of him
in his uniform, given to her by his granddaughter.
Other research uncovered Lazarus’ record at
the National Archives and his Regiment’s diary.
The lot of the British West Indies Regiment
is well documented: they were sent to fight in
many theatres, including the Western Front,
Palestine, and East Africa.
Raising Lazarus is the play that has resulted from
Kat’s journey, and it is set both in the present
and the past. “I play all the parts,” she says. “I
play Lazarus, his partner, my granny, myself…”
She weaves past and present together to best
tell a story that she feels deserves to be told, to
people who might not normally be interested
in delving into history books. And telling it has
become her obsession: she is currently writing a
novel about the British West Indies Regiment.
“It is a subject that has, shamefully, long been
ignored,” she says, “and an important episode of
British history.” Alex Leith
Raising Lazarus, All Saints Centre, Fri 9th Nov,
7.30pm. An Arts Forum of Psychotherapy Sussex
event, followed by a post-performance discussion,
and a recitation of the poem Windrush Postscript,
by John Agard.
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