Claybody Theatre Presents the World Premiere of DIRTY LAUNDRY Next Month

From 11-21 October, the Stoke-on-Trent theatre company Claybody Theatre are set to transform the city's iconic home of bone china - the Spode Works - back to the 1950s for their latest production - the new site-specific play Dirty Laundry.

Written and directed by the husband and wife team of Deborah McAndrew (The UK Theatre Award winning An August Bank Holiday Lark, Northern Broadsides) and Conrad Nelson (Cyrano andOthello, Northern Broadsides) Dirty Laundry is a domestic thriller, set in Stoke-on-Trent in 1953; where a young woman suspects her dying father is carrying a terrible secret. Set against the backdrop of the Clean Air Act the play addresses issues around the environment and its impact on human health on the city's people.

The ambitious site-specific play, supported by Arts Council England, will take its audience to part of the iconic industrial space which will be converted into a theatre, with a set recreating the living room of a small potters' house of the 1950s.

When the audience arrive at the Spode Works site, they will go on an atmospheric journey that takes them into the 1950s, walking through a living installation featuring a community cast of local people. The immersive journey will take them through the site to the performing area.

Playwright Deborah McAndrew said about her new play "The idea for the show originated in someone asking me if I could write an environment play. I had a think about it and realised that the way for drama to do this was not to write about the science, but about the people. Drama, in a nutshell, is people behaving badly - and there is, and always has been, a lot of bad behaviour around the environment and human health.

Stoke on Trent of the 1950s was the perfect place to find such a story. A place in a fixed moment in time, when the smogs of London had finally forced the government to tackle the issue air quality. People in Stoke had been dying of industrial lung disease for over a century, and the upcoming Clean Air Act was going to impact on the pottery industry more than any other.

We feel that Stoke-on-Trent, with its roots in the Industrial Revolution, has such a deep and painful experience of industrial pollution, poor air quality, and occupational disease that it is the perfect place to have this debate about our environment today."

The production's excellent cast will feature Jason Furnival (War Horse, National Theatre), Philip Wright (Ugly Duck, Claybody Theatre), Angela Bain (Cyrano, Northern Broadsides and New Vic Theatre), Rosie Abraham (Anna of the Five Towns, New Vic Theatre), and Robin Simpson (Anna of the Five Towns and Beryl, New Vic Theatre).

Claybody Theatre is a Stoke-on-Trent based company whose work is inspired by the lives and experiences of local people. Founded by playwright Deborah McAndrew and director Conrad Nelson, the company's work includes the highly successful Ugly Duck, first performed at the Burslem School of Art and then at the New Vic Theatre; and Digging In, a play for schools about children of mining families during the 1984-5 Miners' Strike.

Dirty Laundry will premiere at the Spode Works in Stoke-on-Trent from 11-21 October

For more information and tickets visit http://claybodytheatre.com/index.php/2017/08/02/buy-dirty-laundry-tickets-here/.

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