Metro, June 22
It’s easy to marvel at the technical feat of staging three inter-related plays around the same Sheffield square at the same time, actors moving from one venue to another as their scene ends on one stage and continues elsewhere. But Rock, Paper, Scissors, Chris Bush’s ambitious trilogy, is more than impressive logistics. It’s an experience full of heart, soul and pathos, a hymn to the endurance of the human spirit in cities grappling with their meaning in a post industrial age.
Taking place over a couple of hours, it’s set in once-bustling scissors factory, now hollowed out to a few apprentices in a small workshop. The owner of the factory has passed away and it transpires that the woman with plans to make it a cultural music hub is his sister, Susie. Meanwhile his stepdaughter, Faye, also arrives on the scene with her wife, wanting to turn the place into flats. The factory manager, too, hopes the owner might have left it to him and his young apprentices.
Effectively, it’s a six hour play with potential for multiple repetition, so it’s to Bush’s credit that the venues – a disused factory floor, an office, and a workshop – are the scenes for tonally disparate plays focusing on varied themes and generations, making stars of different characters. In Rock, Denise Black is excellent as faded rocker Susie, once a force of nature on the Sheffield scene, looking for something to give her purpose in later life.
Paper is more of a middle-aged domestic drama, Mel and Faye’s relationship creaking as the prospect of a different future becomes tantalisingly close. Natalie Casey is superb at balancing Mel’s emotional breakdown with dry wit.
Finally, Scissors is the workplace drama which zeroes in on the hopes and dreams of young people cast aside by the power structures and decisions of the generations above them. The banter between the four apprentices is brilliant, full of peppy put downs and one liners.
You don’t have to watch the plays in order, or indeed all three, but the full richness of this enterprise can only really come with committing to all of it. It’s then that the thoughtful questions about authenticity and the meaning of life come through; big themes, but this is a project with big ambition.
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