A year before lockdown, Chris Bush, artistic associate at Sheffield Theatres, wrote a soaring tribute to the city, fuelled by the music of Richard Hawley. Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which makes its delayed appearance at the National Theatre next year, proved that the more local and particular, the more far-reaching and resonant. Now Bush and Sheffield artistic director Robert Hastie celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Crucible with another steel-city subject – the disputed future of an old scissor factory. With an extra wheeze.
Three theatres occupy one Sheffield square. Three plays, all written by Bush, produced simultaneously on each stage with the same cast. The plays are intricately linked, telling the same story in the same timeframe from a different viewpoint: a minor character in one could become the lead in another, with actors scampering across the pavements to insert themselves into different dramas. Alan Ayckbourn had interwoven two plays in House & Garden (first in Scarborough, then at the National); three would be still more of a venture.
Rock, Paper and Scissors look at history and families (a factory owner has died leaving competing claimants to his business) and at how change occurs, in individuals and society. Tribute is paid to the industrial past but there is no enshrining. The dialogue persistently refers to transformation, to the second law of thermodynamics and to Ecclesiastes. Don’t panic: there is also a tremendous speech railing against the whole notion of metaphor.
