Cast

Synopsis

This play follows the course of World War Il as experienced by a working class family in Newcastle. In wartime there are great issues, but also private worries, and this story of the family’s personal relationships, pre-occupations, troubles and joys suggests, perhaps, the reason why with all the troubles and perils besieging it – the human race will continue to survive.

Directors Notes

C. P. Taylor was born in Glasgow in 1929, became an electrician and then moved to Newcastle in 1960 where he lived for the last twenty years of his life. During that period he wrote over sixty stage plays, including many for children, as well as more for TV and Radio. An adolescent during the Second World War he wrote, “I grew up under a deeply felt anxiety that the Germans might win the war, overun Britain, and that I and my father and mother would end up, like my less fortunate co-religionists, in a Nazi Death Camp perhaps specially built in Scotland or England’. He had a strong commitment to northern regional theatres, producing plays for their needs rather than the more financially rewarding theatres in the south. He once sadly described his career as ‘a gradual scaling down of ambition’. However throughout his life he kept faith with the socialism of his Glasgow Jewish childhood, and the revolutionary flavour of his early plays gave way to the warm humour that I hope you will enjoy tonight.