Tinderbox
Bush
The Year of Magical Thinking
Lyttelton
If you aren’t sure what to make of the present, try shoving it into the future. This trusted device is employed by Lucy Kirkwood (who writes for Channel 4’s admired show Skins), in her first stage play, Tinderbox. We’re in a nightmarish England, seared by Saharan heat, shrunk by global warming and torn apart by gang warfare. Cockney Saul has moved from drowned London to hilly Bradford where he runs a meat delivery business with his sweet cowed wife Vanessa and their new Scots apprentice Perchik. Gosh, it’s hard to follow this muddled, mapless future. We don’t even know what year we’re in. Instead the script uses valuable time telling us what to think of Saul. He’s a bully, an ex-pimp, a sexist, an Essex boy, a British patriot and he calls his shop his Empire.
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