Culture clash: the story of the biggest drugs bust in Welsh history

“People had to wake up to the fact that the climate crisis was happening,” he explains. “We were destroying our environment, making the planet untenable for our species while taking thousands of other species with us. We had a chance [in the 1970s] but we didn’t take it.” He sees their actions back then as “raising the flag”, and their plight, “a revolution”. “They should have bloody listened,” he adds.

For Styles, attempting to recreate these events and perspectives more than 40 years later has not only been a protracted creative process – the production was delayed by two years because of the pandemic – but one that ultimately shifted focus as a result of her research and interactions with the people that lived through it.

‘With a play, you can be truthful but tell the story in a more creative, interesting way’

“When I first came across this story, I wanted it to be like a caper movie or an Ealing comedy like Whisky Galore!, with these amazing things happening in a small village in west Wales,” she says. “But when you get under the skin of it, it’s all about a really strong environmental message – the serious way they wanted to change the world is so prophetic.”

It raises an interesting question for theatre shows based on real events and the number of perspectives that can, or should, be included. Operation Julie is a complex story of two drug rings entwined with one another, and a police sting involving scores of officers from 11 constabularies. With an exhaustive web of characters, would the story be better suited to a book or true-crime documentary, than a stage production?

“A documentary would be very dry if it was about the investigation, and to have the interweaving stories would become quite confusing,” Styles explains. “With a play, you can be truthful but tell the story in a more creative, interesting way, especially with music – which was such a part of that culture. We’ve tried to make it feel as if it’s happening now, living and breathing in front of you. You don’t get that in a documentary.”

This is, of course, not the first theatre piece of its kind. Theatre has forever been forged and inspired by recent historical events, from Aeschylus’ The Persians, which was written just eight years after the failed 480 BC invasion of Greece that it depicts, to Peter Morgan’s newest play Patriots, currently running at the Almeida Theatre in London and featuring the emergence of a young Vladimir Putin from regional administrator to megalomaniac in waiting.

Discussing his Netflix series The Crown, which is based on the reigning Queen’s monarchy, Morgan said in 2020 that “to make sense of history, you sometimes have to use fiction, imagination and acts of creativity”. Patriots features Putin, played by Will Keen, nurturing his inner dictator and practising his newfound swagger in front of a mirror – a dramatic conceit that is instantly more effective than any journalistic description of his rise to prominence.

While journalism and documentary provide the facts of a situation, drama asks the internal question ‘why?’, which often arises in moments of intimacy, in unheard conversations or unseen actions, moments in a life that can only be unlocked by a dramatist. And on stage, history is unlocked as something apposite as much as it is a memento.

According to Styles, for Operation Julie, “the theatricality of the play gives us the opportunity to see how relevant all of this is now”. She adds: “I want people to come out of the show thinking about what they can do to try and change things in the way Smiles and the others wanted to back then.”

Operation Julie is at Aberystwyth Arts Centre from July 30 to August 13, then touring Wales until September 2