MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds Rosamund Pike’s punchy and tragic portrayal of a multi-tasking mother and high court judge
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‘Heroin came in and swallowed whole cities’
ED EDWARDS has first-hand experience of the hard-drug epidemic ravaging communities and he's written an outstanding play about it. Lynne Walsh reports
FUNNY AND FERAL: Mandy (Eve Steel) and Neil (Neil Bell) in The Political History of Smack and Crack
[The Other Richard] 
FIONA O CONNOR recommends an unflinching depiction of child sexual abuse and its aftershocks, set in a working-class Liverpool family
New releases from Paul Weller, Wet Leg, and Dino Saluzzi
PAUL DONOVAN relishes the spectacle of a 1950s detective in pursuit of a 500-year-old murder mystery
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
IT MIGHT be an exaggeration to claim that there’s a revolution underway in British theatre. But there’s definitely some skilful insubordination going on.
Writers are at the heart of it and Ed Edwards is one of the newer breed of working-class playwrights, though he’s not exactly leading a guerilla force to dismantle the Establishment. He knows how this world works, having earned his stripes writing for radio and TV, authoring six books and making short films for Channel 4 and the BBC.
His latest play The Political History of Smack and Crack may sound like a lecture or, much worse, a workshop. Turns out, it’s a gripping piece of theatre, a classic two-hander, with star-crossed lovers who are funny, feral and fucked-up.
A chronicle of the fallout for communities crushed by the heroin epidemic at the height of Thatcherism, it traces the lives of Mandy and Neil from the epicentre of the riots in 1981 to their present-day survival on the streets of Manchester.
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Caroline Darian, daughter of Gisele Pelicot, took part in a conversation with Afua Hirsch at London’s Royal Geographical Society. LYNNE WALSH reports
This year’s Bristol Radical History Festival focused on the persistent threats of racism, xenophobia and, of course, our radical collective resistance to it across Ireland and Britain, reports LYNNE WALSH
LYNNE WALSH previews the Bristol Radical History Conference this weekend
With most of recorded history dominated by the voices of men, LYNNE WALSH encourages sisters to read the memoirs of women – and to write their own too
