Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
‘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
PICCAP FUNNY AND FERAL: Mandy (Eve Steel) and Neil (Neil Bell) in The Political History of Smack and Crack Pic: The Other Richard
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
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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