MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
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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]
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
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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