Patience & U EXIT NOW (rehearsed reading of selected scenes)

Patience
by Nina Berry

In 1842 a bill is passed by Parliament, prohibiting all female labour underground. In 1984 thousands of miners are locked in a bitter dispute with Thatcher’s government. In 2022 a site is set to become the country’s first new deep coal mine in over 30 years.

Patience is a portrait of life across a stretch of Cumbrian coastline, mapping the ebbs and flows and the loves and losses of a mining community’s motherline, spanning three centuries as past, present and future worlds collide in a heart-wrenching tale of untold stories about the power of community and a symphony of echoes through time.

U EXIT NOW
by Daneka Etchells

A car breaks down. Wires unravel. Libra is waiting for the AA. Jae is preparing to blow up the Caldbeck transmitter. Past and present flicker: the looming influx of second homes, fracturing communities, rotting roots; as Jae’s uncle Milo prepares for war and Jae falls in love with the enemy.

Performed in English and Cumbrian dialect, U EXIT NOW explores skint Cumbria and asks who does our own landscape belong to?

Come and see two plays in progress. Patience and U EXIT NOW are being developed through TBTL and Paines Plough’s Tour The Writer artist development programme.