Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter: Liz Ryan reacts to Sheffield Theatre's epic production of Rock Paper Scissors by Chris Bush

"The script was heightened, fast-paced, funny — and the fact that I’d fallen in love with this gaggle of bright but neglected kids made me want to smack the heads of the grown-up characters."

SCISSORS. Photo credit: Johan Persson

Last Wednesday was enlivened by a trip to Sheffield to see Rock Paper Scissors. This ambitious trilogy, all by the hand of prolific playwright Chris Bush (Standing At The Sky’s Edge), is the centre-piece of Sheffield Theatre’s 50th Anniversary celebrations.

I nearly didn’t attend the press day. The core concept — a single cast dashing between performance spaces to appear in each of the three plays ‘simultaneously’ — struck me as pointless, gimmicky and unlikely to produce great art. Anyway, didn’t Alan Ayckbourn attempt something similar in the 1970s with The Norman Conquests? And what about Michael Frayn’s Noises Off? Not quite the same thing, but still…

Then I had a call from Dan Hayes, editor of my fellow Substack publication, the Sheffield Tribune. Now the Tribune, unlike this kooky but delightful little newsletter, is a Proper Newspaper, which together with its Manchester sister The Mill, has received funding from Substack to explore an alternative business model for local news.

And I believe passionately in local news! In the good old days, the local paper was always at the heart of the community, written by journalists who lived there and cared about it. I’ve never believed decline was inevitable in the digital era. It’s just that the new format — a quality product underwritten by regular subscribers and delivered smoothly to phones — has taken two decades to arrive.

That’s why, when Dan invited me to help with the Tribune’s coverage of this event, I said yes — little suspecting that the forces that wrecked the newspaper business would also be pertinent to the themes of Rock Paper Scissors.

Denise Black (Susie) in ROCK. Photo credut: Johan Persson

I’m glad I went. Dan’s plan, which involved a third writer John Tucker, was that each of us should watch a play during the morning performance and compare notes afterwards. With family connections to the world-famous Sheffield steel industry (my paternal grandmother’s stepfather was a research chemist on the maverick team that developed stainless steel) I opted for the obviously related Scissors.

It was a good call. Each of the three plays was located in a different part of an imagined factory complex. Rock happened in a vast, disused industrial space (clever use of the contemporary Crucible Theatre). Paper was set in the manager’s office (the Edwardian-style Lyceum with its proscenium arch design reinforcing an emphatic fourth wall). And Scissors saw the small Studio in the round become a cramped workshop where four young apprentices applied themselves to learning their craft, as best they could, in conditions which clearly hadn’t changed much since the 19th century.

Seeing that latter play in the morning took me on a different route through the narrative to most of the press pack. Scissors centred on the aspirations of a group of misfit teenagers who didn’t have options elsewhere. The script was heightened, fast-paced, funny — and the fact that I’d fallen in love with this gaggle of bright but neglected kids made me want to smack the heads of the grown-up characters who argued their way through the other two plays with little understanding of the power they held over their lives.

But did it matter in which order I saw the dramas? They were, after all, each telling the same story but from a different perspective.

It’s a counter-factual question I’d have to devote another day in Tudor Square to answer. (Tudor Square being Sheffield’s elegant answer to London’s fairly horrible West End, and the compact location of all three performance spaces.) But an unexpected bonus of seeing Scissors first was that when significant characters from the other dramas appeared on stage, they just appeared, their motivations and personal conflicts largely unexplained to the youngsters — as happens in real life.

SCISSORS. Photo credit: Johan Persson

Susie, an ageing music chick who believes (wrongly) that she has an hereditary stake in the business, unravels sympathetically in Rock. But, without that background, in Scissors she came across as obnoxious. A creature from another world. I last saw the memorable actor Leo Wan dismantling British imperialism with his kit off in Yellow Earth’s reimagined production of Strindberg’s Miss Julie. As hapless estate agent Xander, he does little to suggest in Scissors that his commercial insight might hold the key to the survival of the bespoke scissor-making craft. This fact is only apparent in Rock, where his vision — so potentially transformative for the lives of the apprentices — falls largely on deaf ears.

ROCK. Photo credit: Johan Persson

And then there were Molly and Coco, beautiful and ‘edgy’ performance artists from the ridiculously named Cocodamol, who have been hired as models by Susie to promote the factory space as a performance venue. This sparked my hopes for an interesting backstory — personal tragedy? Me-Too-style sex abuse? — which failed to materialise in the other two dramas. Actress Chanel Waddock did her lively best, but Coco was the most underwritten character in the trilogy, being merely that tired staple of Northern drama — a snooty Southerner who attributes her success to talent and perserverance rather than economic advantage.

Their big moment came in Paper, and was a damp squib. To my mind Paper was the weakest of three segments — demonstrating only that lesbian couples (Natalie Casey as Mel and Samantha Power as Faye) have problems in their marriages just like everybody else. The set was hilarious though — and instantly recognisable to anyone unfortunate enough to have engaged with the British manufacturing industry.

PAPER. Photo credit: Johan Persson

Rock Paper Scissors wasn’t perfect. Jabez Sykes was mesmerizing as the furious Mason — a brainy Aspergers kid smart enough to know that he and the other apprentices were being robbed of their life chances by the failure of the adults around them. But when he launched into a poetic soliloquy on Einstein’s first law of thermodynamics, it came across as pretentious rather than profound. (This strained philosophising about the transformation and conservation of energy was a theme of the other two dramas also.)

Nor was it clear that concurrent dramas — clearly a stimulating challenge for both the cast and the stage management team — added any significant value for the audience. We, of necessity, were — half-remembered O’level physics alert! — the series wiring on the production team’s parallel circuit board. It didn’t detract but nor did it matter hugely to the experience — except with regards to the denouement. After Scissors I already thought I knew, in general terms, what was going to happen to the factory and I took this knowledge with me into Paper and Rock.

But that’s to snipe. And it implies that there was a definitive ending — which there wasn’t, because Bush had optimistically seeded enough professional expertise among the characters in the trilogy to leave me hoping that if only certain people had certain conversations, everything could be sorted out.

Taken as a whole, the production was a stupendous achievement. More than six hours of engrossing drama, fully realised by a Sheffield-born playwright who is surely at the top of her game. And a big shout out to actors Dumile Sibanda, Jabez Sykes, Maia Tamraker and Joe Usher, who played the apprentices. They were terrific.

You can read John Tucker’s review for The Tribune here:

The vaulting ambition of ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’

Rock Paper Scissors, directed by Robert Hastie, Elin Schofield and Anthony Lau, is at the Sheffield Theatres complex on Tudor Square until Jul 2. Tickets cost £15-40 per performance and there is a 20% discount available if you sign up for a season ticket and purchase all three.

See you all soon,

Liz x