What Happens… began life as a gentle piece of correspondence between playwright and actor Tim Crouch and performer, director and drama academic Andy Smith.
Old friends who have neglected one another for various reasons were depicted meeting each other for the first time in years. Both had their roots in the antifa scene and Crouch’s character arrived at Smith’s marital home fresh from a showdown with the EDL – belligerent, paranoid and bolshie in stark contrast to the mellow, liberal left academic that Smith had become.
The script, set against a backdrop of comic dissonance, was a conversation between the two friends and in Smith’s case, the audience, inviting us to think about the nature of community and theatre’s social bonding capacity, was beautifully crafted – positing ideas surrounding individual trajectories, the nourishing yet softening effects that successful Love (as translated through Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou) can bring about and the chasm that can open between two people as their respective ideologies shift in the time they’ve spent apart – with great success.
Two forms of leftist revolution were suggested; that of the alienated hardline radical, proposing violence before total reform, and that of the well-loved liberal, a sensitive, respectful re-organisation.
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