Rock (NHB Modern Plays)

By Chris Bush

Susie used to be a rocker. Susie used to be a radical. Susie was the future once, but that was a long time ago. It's been fifty years since her father bought an old scissor factory, and handed it over to her brother to run. Now Eddie's dead, and finally it's her time in the spotlight. She has big plans for it. She's turning up the volume. She's going to make this city sing again, if it's the last thing she does.
Rock is a play about family, heritage and legacy, and is part of Chris Bush's trilogy of plays about a Sheffield manufacturing family, Rock / Paper / Scissors. The three plays were first performed simultaneously with the same cast moving between three theatres in Sheffield – the Crucible, the Lyceum and the Studio – as part of Sheffield Theatres' fiftieth birthday celebrations in 2022.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Jul 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788506083

Chris Bush

Chris Bush is a playwright, lyricist and theatre-maker. Her plays include: Rock/Paper/Scissors (Sheffield Theatres, 2022); an adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, and New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme, 2022); (Not) the End of the World (Schaubühne, Berlin, 2021); Hungry (Paines Plough, 2021); Nine Lessons and Carols (Almeida Theatre, London, 2020); Faustus: That Damned Woman (Headlong, Lyric Hammersmith and Birmingham Rep, 2020); The Last Noël (Old Fire Station, Oxford, 2019); Standing at the Sky's Edge, a musical with music and lyrics by Richard Hawley (Sheffield Theatres, 2019, revived 2022 and at the National Theatre in 2023, West End 2024); The Changing Room (National Theatre Connections, 2018); Steel (Sheffield Theatres, 2018); an adaptation of Pericles (National Theatre, London, 2018); The Assassination of Katie Hopkins, written with Matt Winkworth (Theatr Clwyd, 2018); What We Wished For and A Dream.

Book preview

ACT ONE

The former main factory floor of an old scissor factory. Back in its heyday, hundreds of workers would have had stations here. Now operations are run on a much smaller scale with a skeleton staff, and this space isn’t used at all, mostly because it’s draughty, high-ceilinged and too expensive to heat. Grimy brick walls, large windows that haven’t been cleaned in decades. Anything useful has been moved or sold. Anything left has gone to rust. Somehow it’s still magnificent.

SUSIE and LEO enter. They take it all in.

SUSIE. It’s really something, isn’t it?

LEO. The light, it’s –

SUSIE. I know.

LEO. Phenomenal.

SUSIE. Did I ever take you round here, back in the day?

LEO. I don’t think so.

SUSIE. I used to sneak boys in when no one was looking and have my way with them in the storage rooms.

LEO. Now I would’ve remembered that.

SUSIE. You missed out.

LEO. Absolutely. (Beat.) It’s those windows. Don’t ever let them clean those windows. That’s what’s doing it.

SUSIE. Hmm?

LEO. The light. Places would kill for that depth of grime.

SUSIE. You think?

LEO. There’s an art director somewhere right now going round a, um, some warehouse somewhere in London, or New York, or San Francisco, with a little, a tin full of gravy browning – that’s what they’d use – an old bean can and a shaving brush, dabbing at his windows, trying to recreate this exact quality of light. But you can’t, because that right there is