Plays
After the Accident
Oedipus in Jail
The Angry Wounds
The Name of the Son
My best known work is “After the Accident”, a play about Restorative Justice. Published by Methuen and commissioned by BBC Radio R4 in a production starring Jack O’Connell and Lia Williams, it won Amnesty international’s “Protect the Human” award in 2008.
For more information on all my works, click on the icons below.
Sixty years after publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s message has never been more relevant: a society dependent upon chemicals for its continued existence, should at least become familiar with the risks and mindful of the consequences. And when those risks are managed or mediated on our behalf by the same companies that produce the chemicals, we have an extra duty to be vigilant.
The modality of chemical companies, particularly in the USA, where the so called “Kehoe Rule” effectively proclaims the chemical innocent until proven guilty, has typically been one of, “Commoditise first, ask questions afterwards.” This was famously the story of lead in petrol, where Robert Kehoe fought a rear-guard action to defend the indefensible against a rising tide of medical knowledge around the toxic effects of lead, especially in the brain development of young people. The rule is reversal of the better known “precautionary principle” and has also been used effectively by the Tobacco industry, to hide behind the veil of uncertainty, in prolonging and maximising the sales of its products.
The agro-chemicals company, Monsanto, forever associated with the manufacture of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, has played a particularly egregious role, not just in the production of now banned, deadly chemicals that linger on as a toxic legacy to our children’s future, but also in the prosecution of those who seek to challenge its right to do so. Unsurprisingly, Monsanto was among the first to identify Carson’s book as a threat to its interests, when first published by the New York Times. Having failed to block publication by legal means, it then sought to vilify Carson herself, while threatening to withdraw advertising from media outlets that carried her story.
Plus ça change. When in 2018 Monsanto lost a landmark case in a jury trial brought by Californian school groundsman Dewayne Lee Johnson, who had fallen sick with cancer following years of applying their herbicide, Roundup, as part of his job, Monsanto was quick to appeal, using its considerable legal muscle to question each subsequent decision made against it. The company, now owned by German corporate, Bayer, has developed a hugely lucrative international business, supplying not just its range of pesticides, but the genetically modified seeds specially designed to resist them, including corn, soy, alfafa and sorghum, not to mention its share of the Indian cotton crop, 95% of which is now also GMO. Yet as the evidence continues to mount against the safety profile of Roundup, Monsanto, or perhaps more properly, Bayer, continues to fight for its right to use it, while making billions of dollars in provision of the inevitable compensatory legal costs.
Even in the twenty-first century, their modality remains the same: to gain maximise return on any product, you cannot afford to be squeamish about its safety profile. Therefore, anyone seeking to raise such concerns should be challenged, blocked, sued or undermined.
A form of warfare by any other name. Pursued, not just against human health, but as Carson might say, against Nature itself.
Scenes from a Poisoning - A Divine Comedy of Monsanto
My current project - in development
After the Accident
Simon Manyonda in After the Accident at the LAMDA Linbury Studio
About the play
I developed ‘After the Accident’ while on a six month attachment at the Birmingham Rep. The attachment, organised through Midlands Script, was an enormous breakthrough for me, as it gave me the opportunity to run at an idea that I had been incubating for years, with the structure and support of a fantastic theatre and dramaturg (Caroline Jester).
The play explores the process of Restorative Justice in the aftermath of a fatal car accident caused by a fifteen year old joyrider, Leon. It’s a three hander, lasting just over one hour, and the economy of the play, along with its tragic intensity, has made it very accessible to small theatre companies and student groups. Since Amnesty International picked it up, as winner their 2008 “Protect the Human” playwriting competition, the play has been very kind to me, winning me my first radio commission on BBC radio 4, an agent (Micheline Steinberg) and a publisher in Methuen Drama. It’s been produced several times, and I’ve had the enormous pleasure of seeing it done brilliantly in schools by GCSE and A level students.
Cube Theatre’s brilliant promotional video:
After the Accident: Promotional Cinematic Trailer - Bing video
Amanda Horlock in the Theatre West Production at the Bristol Alma Tavern
The Name of the Son
The Name of the Son
The religious resonance of the title came about, not because of any intention to write a play on a quasi religious theme, but as the natural outcome of the very bizarre story I found myself writing. It wasn’t planned, and there was no early attempt at a storyline. It just was me staring at the computer, attempting to follow Harold Pinter’s advice, when he wrote about listening to voices in a dark space. What emerged was very dark, in part, a demonic retelling of the story of the Prodigal Son. But the father, while being a devilish character in terms of his function and his manipulative use of power, is also possessed of a deep pitifulness. I found this quite frightening, because, well, I am a father, and a son at the same time. But I would guess that the play also drew on the experience of the recent London bombings of 2005, and the discussions that followed about the power of religious fundamentalism. As a Christian, I don’t mean that this then became a play about Islam: it became much more intensely, a play about myself, and the notion of fatherhood that can literally bedevil the religious project. As Freud pointed out, it’s difficult to tease out the God thing, without understanding the Father thing also.
It was produced by Theatre West at the Bristol Alma Tavern, directed by Caroline Hunt, who also went onto direct After the Accident in for its touring production.
Oedipus in Jail
Written and developed with Michael Crowley, with support of Arts Council England.
Four male prisoners compelled to undergo a victim awareness course, collaborate on a comic re-enactment of a pantomime to evade the stories they’d rather not tell. When they agree to dramatise their own crimes, they gradually find themselves becoming prisoners in an ancient story: a tale of shame and savage self-delusion, from which each must find his own way out.
O-i-J received various readings including the Manchester 24/7 Festival, the King’s Arms, Salford, and Gustavus Adolphus college, Minnesota.
The Angry Wounds
Play inspired by Sophocles “The Philoctetes”. Directed by Alex Clifton at the Oxford Classics Faculty, with support of the Oxford Onassis Foundation.
The story of the wounded bowman, Philoctetes seemed a timely homage to make, in the context of our seemingly intractable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never mind that I had originally supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Odysseus, as the villain of the piece, brilliantly played by Adrian Lukis, is type of Tony Blair, albeit spread over with extra buttery layer of cynicism.
The play never received a full production, through Sophoclean scholar, Eric Dugdale was kind enough to include mention of it on an article here, on plays as Public Testimony: