Veronica Needa

Veronica Needa in MAPPA MUNDI

Veronica Needa, who died on Wednesday, was a great friend to Border Crossings and a hugely significant figure in both intercultural and community theatre practice. I first met her as long ago as 1999, when I was assembling the cast for MAPPA MUNDI: the first production we did that was fully funded and our first foray into intercultural devising. I was looking for someone from a Chinese background who would be able to improvise and create, and who could also bring some knowledge of traditional forms. I got in touch with David Tse, who was then running Yellow Earth, and he suggested Veronica. 

We met at the ENO's old rehearsal rooms in West Hampstead. Veronica didn't have a stereotypical Chinese "look", and it emerged very quickly that she was an embodiment of cosmopolitanism in her DNA. As well as Chinese, she was of British, Japanese and Syrian descent; usually describing herself as a "Hong Kong Eurasian". The year before we met, she had turned her extraordinary family history into a dazzling one-woman show called FACE, and this re-telling of personal histories from diverse viewpoints (very fashionable now, but highly innovative then) was clearly a passion of hers. As well as making her the professional writer-performer that she was, this passion fed into her leadership role in the Playback Theatre movement, both in the UK and around the world. As the founder of the School of Playback Theatre UK and London Playback Theatre, Veronica brought this very immediate, deeply therapeutic form  into the centre of Applied Theatre practice. This skill and passion meant that she could not only be at the centre of our devising company: she was also ideally placed to lead community workshops alongside our development work.

As we started to develop MAPPA MUNDI, Veronica's influence on the whole company was profound. Without my ever stating it as the through line of the play, we all found ourselves re-telling stories from our family histories. Veronica's Chinese grandmother Lily (whose Chinese name was Wong Seui Gum) became a central figure in one key narrative: a quiet spectator of Hong Kong's turbulent 20th century. Veronica always said that she wasn't political, and sometimes resisted my attempts to place Lily's story in a wider historical framing - but in truth she was deeply political, above all in her burning desire to bring the stories of marginalised or overlooked people onto the stage. It was high politics, soiled by ambition and corruption, that she so mistrusted.

Although she only did that one show with us, it was a landmark one, and we stayed in touch thereafter. Veronica was one of the "21 Faces of Border Crossings" who marked the organisation's birthday with a retrospective publication in 2016. She wrote there about our intercultural work as "such an important, rich and healing creative endeavour", emphasising that it had only grown in importance since the early days. She came to see the work, particularly when we were collaborating with Chinese performers and companies. She was a bit unsure about DIS-ORIENTATIONS - I suspect because of its overtly political elements - but she loved the more intimate CONSUMED in 2013, bringing her friend Anna Chen, who wrote a glowing review in the Morning Star (ironically the most politically aware commentary we received on that play). In 2014 she came to THIS FLESH IS MINE ("it's SO interesting") - and I realised this morning that I had not seen her in person since. Nine years... The Hong Kong actor Indy Lee, to whom she introduced me, had mentioned she was ill. Today Indy sent me a WhatsApp with the words "Sad news" and a link to a website set up for tributes. 

It says: "Veronica always loved stories. Feel free to share."