PRODUCTIONS

Theatre

WORLDS APART By Darren Rapier

Produced at The Brockley Jack in 2006 (See 'reviews')

A play set in India and the UK.   Vincent and Conny are an Anglo-Indian couple whose lives are torn apart by the partition of India in 1947. Effectively losing their homeland they come to England, hoping to repair the damage, but 60’s London has little in the way of home comforts.

SMOKE By Darren Rapier

Produced at The Union Theatre

Synopsis

London 1866. ELEANOR and her sister LILLY return to their Bermondsey home from a shopping trip to the West End. Their mother MRS. MILL has raised them single handed in the absence of their father JOSH who has been killed by a tiger while conscripted to the British army in India. But this stable ‘house of women’ is interrupted by the arrival of two men from the Railway company.

From here on it seems that the more men who enter their lives the more complicated their lives become. FLEECE and GRUBBER (the railway representatives) have come to buy the house, so that their company can build a new line into London. This comic duo are highly ambitious, hoping to work their way up into railway owners themselves one day. The whole of London is besieged with building work and schemes to build more and more railways, so it is important that work starts as soon as possible. But MRS. MILL, much to the disgust of LILLY, refuses to sell.

MR. BELLWETHER their boss is none too pleased with the news. His exasperation is further fuelled by the realisation that his son HORATIO will probably never have the balls to run the company: A balloon trip to spy on the other railway companies has yielded a six line poem instead.

Meanwhile ELEANOR has sided with her mother, regardless of the fact that the whole neighbourhood is now falling to pieces because of the construction work. If they don’t want to sell then they shouldn’t have to. She will write to the company and tell them so.

At the railway company HORATIO thinks she is a messenger from FLEECE and takes the letter to be a map. When he discovers she hates the company he lies about who he is, telling her he is a poet but will ensure MR. BELLWETHER gets the note. He takes her address but when FLEECE arrives the map gets put into the envelope and posted back to her. To complicate things further JOSH arrives back - apparently not dead, nor in the army - he has been working as a bricklayer for a rival company.

So JOSH, as the rightful owner of the house, offers FLEECE a secret cash deal. ELEANOR is in love with a non existent poet, thinking him to be HORATIO and MRS. MILL is furious that JOSH has turned out to be a bricklayer (not to mention LILLY, who has told the tragic story of his death many times over).

But ELEANOR discovers HORATIO’s lie, BELLWETHER disowns his son for having a social conscience and we discover that neither MRS. MILL or JOSH legally own the house at all. In a grand highly dramatic conclusion HORATIO is killed at a riot in Hyde Park, before ELEANOR can tell him how she truly feels and before BELLWETHER can reconcile with him. LILLY realises the folly of her idyllic world. FLEECE washes his hands of the whole affair and GRUBBER grasps the fact that there are no friends in business after all.


SMOKE pays homage to the Victorian melodrama, whilst resonating contemporary fears and ideas. It is fast paced and good humoured, without losing sight of a serious message.

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