Production note  

 

What the Press said

Introduction

Author’s note on the text

Original cast

Production photos

Sources / Bibliography

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 The staging needs to be very fluid, to allow the action and changes of speaker or location to flow seamlessly. 

 In Salisbury we had a bare stage, with an upper level at either side.  Slides were projected onto an overhead screen, but as these are not essential, I have removed them from the text, apart from a reference to the final collage, which is part of the story. 

The slides we used in the Salisbury production were: 

  • A threshing machine
  • Cartoon: ‘The skeleton at the plough’
  • Cartoon: death sentence
  • The Wesleys
  • Membership certificate of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union
  • The Home Office 
  • The caution
  • The calendar of prisoners at the lent assizes 1834
  • Coat of arms at Dorchester Assizes
  • “that a petition be presented to his majesty praying that he will be pleased to remit the sentence”
  • Cartoon: the King rejecting labourer’s pleas for mercy
  • Demonstration at Copenhagen Fields, London
  • The York hulk
  • Prison ship at sea
  • Print of convicts working
  • House of Commons portcullis
  • Engraving of tall ships in harbour
  • Sale note of New House Farm
  • The Charter being taken to parliament
  • The epitaph from George & Betsy Loveless’s grave

 The sequence of Trade Union landmarks included: 

  • membership certificate of the National Agricultural Labourer’s Union
  • the first Trade Union Congress 
  • the General Strike
  • opposition to the means test
  • the National Insurance scheme
  • nationalisation of the mines
  • the introduction of state education, and health and safety legislation
  • Grunwick
  • Lucas Aerospace Joint Shop Stewards Committee Arms Conversion Bus
  • the Miners’ strike, & Orgreave
  • GCHQ
  • Wapping

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