Apples

2 Jun – 25 Sept 2010
Written by Richard Milward
Adapted & directed by John Retallack

Shameless, ruthless and intensely poetic, ‘Apples’ is a dazzling, tragicomic love story of adolescence. Eve has tasted every kind of apple. Adam hasn’t tasted anything at all. When two such different people meet, is paradise lost or might it be found?

Set on a Middlesbrough council estate, this astonishing piece of writing by Richard Milward, written when he was just 23, is an electrifying collision of Irvine Welsh and Virginia Woolf. Streams of poetic, impassioned and often hilarious words pour from five fifteen year olds as they negotiate a world where the adults are absent, drugs are everywhere, sex is desperate and life is both terrifying and thrilling.

The characters feed every stereotype currently applied to young disaffected people; they are violent, shameless, ruthless, and their horizons reach only to their next night out. And yet they challenge our prejudices, because Milward reveals their brave, complex and profound inner lives, battling for self-esteem, afraid of not knowing who they are, loving and indifferent in equal measure, bewildered, optimistic, intelligent and daft. The events of the story are shocking, and a clarion call to improve the lives and hopes of young people in the UK.

A Boundless Theatre and Northern Stage co-production.

Awards

Winner of Herald Angel Award.