Rock Paper Scissors: A Sheffield Trilogy That's Also Family History (At Least For Me)
"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."
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 alternat…