A European Playwright Writing In English
The Way We Live Now
For a change, this is a play with purely English subject matter! It's a play I have worked on since 2002, new draft just completed, 2009.
Its ostensible subject matter is a wedding, and a middle middle-class wedding at that. It's a comedy, revolving around the insane consumerist expense of the wedding etc. But it's also a play of anxieties and worries, of dysfunctionalism and encroaching chaos. The house of the groom's parents (where the entire play is set) keeps getting burgled. There are tramps and the mentally ill, courtesy of the government's Community Care policy, who keep knocking on the door and invading the play's apparently anodyne space. A twelve year old child is running a protection racket.
Ultimately, behind the hoped for laughter, it's a play that proposes the need for Britain to radically alter its economic and so-called democratic structures, and attacks the decline of the British manufacturing and technological base as a woeful waste of creative talent. Donald, one of the play's principal characters, is an inventor of genius who finds it impossible to get the investment from banks that he so desperately needs. But why is there a Jack Russell in the play?
Cast: 8 men, 3 women (and a Jack Russell!)
Production history: Questors Theatre, London (reading), 2002.
