IT MIGHT be an exaggeration to claim that there’s a revolution underway in British theatre. But there’s definitely some skilful insubordination going on.

Writers are at the heart of it and Ed Edwards is one of the newer breed of working-class playwrights, though he’s not exactly leading a guerilla force to dismantle the Establishment. He knows how this world works, having earned his stripes writing for radio and TV, authoring six books and making short films for Channel 4 and the BBC.
 
His latest play The Political History of Smack and Crack may sound like a lecture or, much worse, a workshop. Turns out, it’s a gripping piece of theatre, a classic two-hander, with star-crossed lovers who are funny, feral and fucked-up.

A chronicle of the fallout for communities crushed by the heroin epidemic at the height of Thatcherism, it traces the lives of Mandy and Neil from the epicentre of the riots in 1981 to their present-day survival on the streets of Manchester.

Having revelled in sold-out runs at the Soho Theatre and the Edinburgh fringe festival it’s now touring nationally. It got great reviews when it first saw the light of day, with this very newspaper awarding it five stars. https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/diary-plague-years
 
Edwards, quite used to his personal story becoming the story, is not blasé. He acknowledges that his narrative appeals — semi-literate at 11, he got to university, studied drama and mixed with people of a very different class.
 
Then there was the drug use, the addiction, the jail time – three-and-a-half years at the Crown’s displeasure. But Edwards did make huge use of the prison library: “I read the whole of Capital and Balzac, Tolstoy, Dickens,” he says.
 
Not that this was a turning point, some salvation of a juvenile delinquent, saved by prison-time reflection and a supply of books. Edwards had already secured his degree. “I’d written a book [it came out the day he got banged up]. I was trying to be writer all along — but I was too fucking stoned,” he recalls.
 
The prison let him bring a typewriter in. That’s an image that would grip an audience now, were he ever to write the story of his own turbulent life.
 
If that seems a Disneyfied stereotype, Edwards’s political education is rooted in events much more real. When communist Viraj Mendis claimed sanctuary in a Manchester church in the late 1980s, his case making national news, Edwards was the campaign’s press officer.
 
His approach now reveals a man who still uses writing as a campaigning tool. He’s passionate about the problems of addiction and the state’s dreadful hand in the supply of drugs, particularly heroin.
 
“Heroin came in and swallowed whole cities. In 1979 you’d had 2-3,000 addicts. That‘s grown to 330,000 addicts.”
 
He cites times in recent history when counter-revolutionary movements coalesced with the upsurge of drugs. Links between the mojahedin of Afghanistan and the forlorn youngsters of Moss Side reveal a deliberate tactic of the capitalist system, he asserts.
 
“You have all these young men who lose their identity. It’s all the cliches of sociology but when people have no jobs and no hope of jobs and a lot of heroin coming into the country, what do we expect?”
 
His chosen moment for the play’s setting is specifically July 8, 1981. For the purposes of this drama, it is the day that “the history of England jumps off its axis.” It was at 2am that “all the major cities in England burn.”
 
In Edwards’s dramatic summary of that rioting in Toxteth, Brixton, Handsworth, Chapeltown and Moss Side: “Suddenly there’s young people everywhere. Young people who love the sound of breaking glass.

“This is the epicentre of unemployment. The epicentre of police harassment. The epicentre of people who’ve had enough of cops kicking them around. The epicentre of Margaret Thatcher’s England. This is – crash!”
 
The sound of a brick through a window. And in Edwards’s world, where specificity is key, it’s a pawn shop window.
 
The Political History of Smack and Crack runs at HOME in Manchester on January 27 and 28, box office: homemcr.org, and then tours England and Scotland until February 22.