The York Realist

At the heart of the play is a gay love story set in York in the early 1960s. While putting on the York Miracle Plays, a middle class young man has met a working class man and tries to persuade him to leave York for London, where he is working in the theatre. But unlike so many working class artists in the 1960s, he stays at home. The play is also a meditation on art, and in particular on the existence of an alternative tradition that goes back to the York Mystery Cycles whose work is both tough and emotional, unsentimental and profoundly felt.