The play that changed my life: ‘Your Home in the West was an explosive act of anger’
Rod Wooden’s play about poverty in Newcastle broached the class divide with disconcerting realism
I was a middle-class kid growing up in a very working-class city, Newcastle. It was a great place for theatre, with the Playhouse and Live theatre. The RSC visited every year and I have a distinct memory of Kenneth Branagh in Henry V, seeing rain on stage and properly drinking the theatre Kool-Aid. But if the RSC productions I saw were a scented candle, Rod Wooden’s play Your Home in the West was semtex.
I saw it at Live theatre in the early 1990s. I was very aware of the social and political tensions of that era. My parents – both very leftwing – had taken me on marches as a kid to support the miners. The north-east still suffered greatly from the loss of the coalmines and of shipbuilding. I knew a lot of people whose lives were directly affected.
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