Arranging Reunion
BBC thriller Reunion is a story of revenge and redemption – and a bilingual series featuring spoken English and British Sign Language. Creator William Mager and star Matthew Gurney tell DQ how they made the show and how they sought to represent deaf people authentically.
BBC drama Reunion is a compelling emotional thriller that tells a story of revenge and redemption as one man attempts to right his wrongs while investigating the events that led him to prison for murder.
Notably, the four-parter is also a bilingual series that blends spoken English with British Sign Language – and it’s a project that leading actor Matthew Gurney had wanted to be a part of for a very long time.
When he first read the script for Reunion, “I felt, ‘Finally, finally.’ It was like a sigh of relief,” he tells DQ. “Finally, we’re here. We’ve been waiting for this for 20 years. You’ve seen deaf people in [series] with hearing people in the lead. They’re not the main role. It’s nice that they’re there, but when is it gonna be a deaf person’s time?
“For me, Reunion felt different from all of those other programmes that I’ve seen. And I was like, ‘Yes, here we go, finally.’ And Brennan’s character… He’s a strong man, he’s a broken man, but he’s a very complicated human and I’m glad that he’s been shown like that. Oh, he is a deaf man and we use his sign language. It’s not about that; he just happens to be a deaf man who uses sign language, and I think that’s brilliant.”
Gurney plays Daniel Brennan, a deaf man caught between two worlds – unable to fully integrate into the hearing world and shunned by his closest friends and the wider deaf community as a consequence of his crimes. Amid this isolation, his only meaningful relationship is with his estranged daughter Carly (Lara Peake), with whom he has not had any contact since his arrest more than a decade ago.
Other characters include Christine (Anne-Marie Duff), who is desperate to find Brennan and get to the truth behind what he did, supported by Stephen (Eddie Marsan), her protective boyfriend, and her daughter Miri (Rose Ayling-Ellis).
Produced by Warp Films (Adolescence) and distributed by BBC Studios, the project began as a spec script from series creator and deaf writer William Mager, who wrote Reunion for himself as an example of the type of programme he wanted to see on screen – one with a deaf antihero, moving through the post-industrial Sheffield landscape with a gun, a mysterious mission and his estranged young daughter in tow.
“I drew on a lot of influences – my favourite spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name; Dead Man’s Shoes by Warp Films; and a clutch of classic 70s thrillers about granite-faced men in sharp suits doing tough stuff such as The Getaway, The Outfit, Point Blank and Get Carter,” he says.
“But the biggest inspiration for Reunion was Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon. The story of an estranged father and daughter on a road trip through depression-era America, it made a huge impression on me the first time I watched it as a kid, and it still holds up beautifully today. There are parallels between the America of then and the Britain of today, hit by austerity and huge rises in the cost of living.”
Through the four episodes, director Luke Snellin’s camera barely leaves Brennan’s side as viewers are invited to follow him on his journey. “But it’s a journey that changes from one of revenge into something more meaningful – reconnection and redemption,” says Mager. “He’s beautifully embodied by Matthew Gurney, who I wrote the role for from the start.”
He credits “sheer luck and good fortune” for the fact that Reunion has been made at all, recalling a development process that began several years ago when he was a producer at the BBC and booked actor and presenter Joe Sims for a voiceover job.
A few years later, he had left the BBC to pursue a career in screenwriting and, after a chance meeting with Sims, he was encouraged to submit his Reunion spec script to Philip Shelley’s 4screenwriting scheme. When it was accepted, Sims asked to read it and asked if he could share it with his partner Gwen Gorst, who happened to be an executive producer at Warp Films.
“I immediately said yes, of course. Warp Films were my dream company from the start, being based in my birthplace of Sheffield,” Mager says. “Cue Joe hovering behind Gwen’s desk asking if she’d read it. When she did get round to reading it, she immediately passed it to Mark Herbert, one of the CEOs of Warp. Mark read it on the train going up from London to Sheffield. By Leicester, he decided he wanted to make it.”
The BBC greenlit the project eight months later, “and it was warp speed from then on,” Mager adds. “It was around one-and-a-half years of writing, in production after that and it all happened very quickly. I’m very lucky that I just happened to book Joe to do voiceover for me all those years ago.”
Still relatively new to screenwriting, Mager determined to accept every piece of advice and offer of collaboration that was offered to him as he wrote the Reunion scripts, often working at a small office rented by Warp near his home.
“I’d walk there with my dog, brew a pot of coffee, stare at the screen for a few hours, then go home again,” he says. “Through this process and a lot of regular meetings with the story team of Gwen Gorst, Siobhan Morgan and Isabella Yianni, a lot of index cards and a lot of thinking, we ended up with four pretty good episodes. Or so I thought.”
Then as they were going over the scripts and taking on feedback from the BBC, “feeling like we were a bit stuck,” Snellin joined fresh from Netflix hit One Day and brought a new outlook to the show.
“His main contribution was to establish an ongoing motif of visual memories, slowly coming into focus throughout the four episodes,” Mager says. “Luke was collaborative and open-minded, and I couldn’t have wished for a better director to learn the ropes with.”
A key element of the series is how it blends spoken English with British Sign Language, and the writer says he was “really careful” when thinking about when different characters would sign and when they would use their voices – often being led by the actors themselves.
“Brennan, being from a deaf family and brought up in BSL, would sign all the time but use his voice when he needed to try to communicate with a hearing person,” he explains. “We had a big deaf cast who brought their own choices to the filming, making their own decisions on when to voice and when to speak, and deciding what signs they preferred to use with the help of Brian Duffy, our BSL coach who also worked with Lara Peake and Anne-Marie Duff to learn their BSL dialogue.”
Mager was particularly involved in the casting process along with agency Harkin & Toth, and found making the show also proved to be an off-screen reunion between himself and many actors he previously worked with at the BBC.
“It was amazing to see such a breadth of deaf acting talent,” he says. “It became an ongoing joke between me and Nathan Toth – every time a new deaf actor came in and blew me away, I’d tell Nathan I was going to write a new part for them.
“But I did in fact write a new role in Reunion after the auditions – for Stephen Collins, to play Sean, a character who wasn’t in early drafts of the script at all. He came back to read for the new role and absolutely blew everyone away.”
Authenticity was also important behind the camera, with lots of deaf people in the crew and in the production office, as well as co-first AD Sam Arnold. Mager worked closely with Snellin during an “intensive” rehearsal period to hone the BSL parts of the script and check translations for the deaf and signing actors. Meanwhile, Duffy worked with Peake and Duff to help them memorise their BSL lines.
“I was really nervous on set, feeling the responsibility of delivering an accurate, authentic portrayal, and I think I was giving Luke far too many notes on set each day for the first couple of weeks,” the writer says. “Once I realised that, between Luke and [producer] Helen Ostler and the deaf cast, they all had it covered, I was able to step back a bit and trust the process. The dailies that came back each day were absolutely amazing, which helped a lot.”
Filming Reunion was a “completely different ballgame” for Gurney compared with his previous television work. An accomplished theatre actor, he also was once a presenter for Channel 4. “This was such a big production. There were so many people on the crew, but luckily we were completely absorbed into it because we were watching what people were doing,” he says. “I was really close with the first AD and Luke, the director. We’d be very prepared as to what was going on.
“There was lots to take on, but that kind of helped me and it was really smooth. I really enjoyed the filming process. We were all equal, we were all very professional but relaxed. I like engaging with people, like all the different departments, props, sparks, sound – not just the actors. We’re all together and that’s why I really enjoyed it, because we all work together so well. When we finished it, I missed everyone, I really did. It was like we became a family.”
Challenges on set included working with hearing actors like Marsan and Duff, and judging when they had finished speaking so he would jump in with his lines. “In theatre, we always cue each other. We have an action and movement that means it’s my cue. But in this, it was like, ‘Hang on, can I just clarify with you before we start how I’m going to cue?’ That was quite a challenge,” he says. “Obviously with deaf people and deaf actors, we know how to take turns, but obviously he [Marsan]’s speaking and I’m signing, so he doesn’t know when to take his cue from me. So it’s up to us to work together as actors to work out the turn take. But Eddie was brilliant. We had a great scene together, it went really well.”
“A film set isn’t always an easy place to be for a deaf person,” notes Mager. “Time is money, and the schedule was tight. A fast and efficient set doesn’t always naturally accommodate a deaf person with a sign language interpreter, and a hearing crew member with a walkie talkie can communicate something far quicker. So there were times when I really felt that, particularly being on set in the video village – but everyone at Warp Films and on the production team was working with the intention to make the set as accessible, and the process as smooth, as possible.”
He adds: “One thing I loved about being on the set of Reunion was seeing everyone’s enthusiasm for the story we were telling. Everyone genuinely wanted Reunion to be a big success, and everyone was working towards that same goal. It was really lovely to see, even if we were battling some of the worst of Sheffield’s rain, wind and freezing cold.”
Following the show’s debut last week, viewers can already watch all four episodes of Reunion on BBC iPlayer, with the series continuing with episode three on BBC One tonight and concluding tomorrow.
“I hope deaf and hearing audiences come to Reunion. I hope they stay with it and enjoy the portrayal of Sheffield, the deaf world and the talented deaf and hearing cast,” Mager says. “Most of all, regardless of critical reception or viewing figures, I hope Reunion starts conversations about difficult subjects and about what it really means to be deaf.
“I hope people look back in a few years’ time and remember Reunion as being something that changed the conversation around deafness and sign language.”
Gurney also hopes Reunion leads other screenwriters to be more aware of the deaf community before it is portrayed on screen. “Lots of people have just failed at that because the writers don’t know what our community’s like and how we live, but Billy is authentic,” the actor says of Mager. “The Reunion story is going to be successful and people’s reactions are good because it’s authentic and it comes from an authentic way. It’s not tokenistic. We want it to be authentic.”
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tagged in: BBC, BBC Studio, Matthew Gurney, Reunion, Warp Films, William Mager