Review: The Political History of Smack and Crack, Bristol Old Vic Weston Studio

Ed Edwards’ award-winning play is not only a searing exposé of the true levels of social decimation that were inflicted under Thatcher’s regime, but also a title that stops you in your tracks – no laughable pun intended, considering ‘the needle and the damage done’ in those years. It’s also a title I’d quite like to walk into a beauty parlour and order as an off-menu procedure, purely out of a punkish desire to see the look on someone’s face.

In the play, Edwards postulates that the UK heroin epidemic of the early 1980s was the result of an orchestrated plan, by a government besieged by inner-city riots, to flood the market with drugs obtained from the very Third World regimes it was propping up. In short, a dystopian conspiracy theory in which a peasant’s uprising was quelled by opiates – the 80s equivalent of the soma of Huxley’s Brave New World.

Edwards makes the personal political by following the arc of two young addicts – a Mancunian Romeo & Juliet of sorts – who start to get their kicks through shoplifting and then progress to weed, smack and crack use. The protagonists point out to us that, prior to the riots in 1981, there were just a few hundred registered heroin addicts in the UK. Just three years later there were 330,000, making 1984 an Orwellian year in all senses.

The contents of Smack and Crack are seismic enough to spark a public enquiry, though why would our current Glorious Leader and his cohort wish to peer into the darkest historical workings of their former Leaderene? If it always takes at least 50 years before the true facts emerge, this matter won’t make the news before 2031, if ever.

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Laura Wade’s incendiary Posh similarly failed to prevent the grown-up members of the Bullingdon Club – headed by the Cameron/Osborne/Johnson triad – from taking over Westminster. But then, plays are still mainly consumed by the metropolitan elite and not the general voting public.

This particular play certainly bucks the trend of glossy light entertainment that’s on offer in most British theatres, in that it’s packed with biting and urgent social commentary. In these modern times of austerity and social disintegration on a global scale, most main-stage theatre seems to be largely offering up jolly content-lite work to make an audience forget its woes for a couple of hours: when times are hard, the temptation is to make ‘em laugh with all-dancing all-singing soma-theatre. So is theatre itself in danger of becoming an opium of the people?

Eve Steele and Neil Bell in ‘The Political History of Smack and Crack’. Pics: The Other Richard

All this and more was heatedly discussed around our table post-show in the Old Vic bar, while the main house audience (for Romantics Anonymous) filed out looking entertained – both houses were sold out. Different strokes for different folks, or maybe it’s a case of pick ‘n mix, according to your mood. I for one was glad I caught this explosive, funny-angry and hard-hitting evocation of a pivotal point in time.

The Political History of Smack and Crack was at Bristol Old Vic Weston Studio from Wed, Jan 22 to Sat, Jan 25.

Read more: The theatre company transforming representation in Bristol arts