MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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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
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
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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