In his 2018 play The Political History of Smack and Crack, Ed Edwards made the connection between government policy and the 1980s epidemic of heroin use. Narratives about criminality tend to see illegal activity in isolation but this playwright cares about cause and effect. Socially disruptive behaviour, he would argue, does not happen by accident.
In a less developed way, he does the same thing in this vehicle for Mark Thomas, which frames the tale of a juvenile offender through the lens of colonialism. As Edwards presents it, the violence meted out by the British army in countries such as the former Malaya was a legalised version of the violence passed down from returning soldiers to their families. In their wake, they leave abused partners, damaged children and broken communities.
