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Drama: We Love You, Arthur
We Love you Arthur, a new play by Fiona Evans, tells the story of Julie
and Lisa, two girls coming of age in a community being torn apart.
Growing up is never easy, especially in Easington Colliery during 1984.
Achieving big hair can be problem, but how can you ever look like Cyndi
Lauper when your dad’s out on strike and you can’t afford food, never
mind a can of extra-hold, perm-welding Elnett? And will you ever fit in
when the poster-boy you adore is neither Simon le Bon nor Adam Ant, but
a middle-aged ginger bloke with a comb-over?
Published in 2005
106 pages, colour cover
ISBN 0-9541456-6-6
Price: £5 plus £2 post and packaging
A review of We Love You, Arthur from The Scotsman (20 August 2005)
WE LOVE YOU ARTHUR ASSEMBLY@ GEORGE
STREET (VENUE 3)
JOYCE McMILLAN
It wasn't easy, being a kid during the miners' strike of the early
1980s. There was poverty, confusion, disruption at home. Communities
were bitterly divided down the middle, as some miners returned to work
while others held out in their increasingly hopeless battle to save
their communities and jobs. But there was also excitement, passion, a
driving sense of purpose and, as the title of Fiona Evans's lovely and
heart-wrenching play suggests, plenty of hero-worship directed at the
unlikely middle-aged figure of the miners' charismatic leader, Arthur
Scargill.
It begins in fairly downbeat community-theatre style, this unassuming
90-minute drama about two teenage girls caught up in the tension of
their parents' struggle. Four actors play a fistful of characters,
sometimes using the rough-and-ready indicative style of popular
agitprop comedy, a hairnet to evoke this character, a silly voice for
that one.
As the story evolves, Evans and director Mark Catley gradually whip up
a powerful and compelling loss-of-innocence drama that moves far beyond
political platitudes to explore deep adult themes of trust and
betrayal, solidarity and breach of faith - with an energy and freshness
that often catches the breath and touches the heart.
Joanne Hickson and Ashlea Sanderson give two of the most open-hearted
and moving performances in town as chums Lisa and Julie, with terrific
support from Zoe Lambert as Lisa's mum, going through all the changes
the strike crisis brought to women's lives.
And the soundtrack of this show is the best early-1980s party tape in
town, a mixture of Sade and George Michael, The Smiths and Billy Bragg,
that brings the memory of those strange times rushing back with
terrific force and helped move many in the audience to tears. |
