Tinderbox

Synopsis

In the late 21st Century, one man still clings to Traditional British Values, managing his wayward wife and running a butchers shop: his Empire. When Perchik, committed vegetarian and outlaw artist, swims across Hadrian’s Channel to England and stows away in a container full of meat, he lands up in Saul’s shop. Since Saul’s last boy went missing, Perchik gets an instant job offer. With riots raging in the streets outside, it may be safest to accept. Or maybe not.

Our Review:

29 April 2008

Lucy Kirkwood is a first-time playwright with an almost farcically pessimistic view of the world if Tinderbox is anything to go by: her dystopian scene is an abandoned butcher’s shop in Bradford around World Cup year 2018, and the city is on fire with rioting. One can only presume that our national team has come a cropper yet again.

A Scottish vegetarian artist, Perchik, arrives in a meat sack and is taken on as an assistant by the rabidly nationalist butcher Saul, whose much younger wife, Vanessa, is familiar to Perchik through some pornographic films made on behalf of the Conservative Party. In the course of the play, which hinges on a budding love story, Vanessa re-enacts her lingerie-clad Lady Hamilton in the cheeky tribute movie “Fellatio Nelson.”

Saul and Vanessa are refugees from Barking, which was flooded when the River Roden burst its banks. Their children were killed in the 2012 (Olympics Year) attacks on Stratford East. Former employees in ...

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Martin - 21 May 2008:

John Cooper Clarke's "Beasley Street" put on a small stage. Brilliant, sad, tragic, and funny. I really enjoyed it. Martin ...

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