{"id":149,"date":"2013-05-16T10:52:31","date_gmt":"2013-05-16T10:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/?p=149"},"modified":"2021-04-29T15:24:06","modified_gmt":"2021-04-29T15:24:06","slug":"149","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/?p=149","title":{"rendered":"Posh background: how an old soke became a new town"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following review is of the 2013 production. \u00a0It is good to see that the play has been revived in 2015.<\/a><\/p>\n

Musical theatre thrives on improbable subject matter. Who would have thought a board game, animal sociology or a ‘magic’ train set could be the basis for long-running hits? Even in such iconoclastic company, though, a study of the life and times of the Peterborough Development Corporation (PDC) sounds prosaic.<\/p>\n

Eastern Angles<\/a> Parkway Dreams, however, with its singing architects and saxophone-tooting planning officers, is a joyful celebration of the idealism and energy required to create Britain\u2019s post-war new towns. It is also testimony to the extraordinary human investment demanded of those who decamped to become their residents. Weaving together the stories of the dramatic expansion of Peterborough, designated a \u2018new town\u2019 in 1967, and a London family who moved there in the early 1970s, it makes believable heroes of the planners, architects as well as the \u2018overspill\u2019 families whose arrival swelled the fenland city.<\/p>\n

Like a lot of Eastern Angles work, the play (written by Kenneth Emson, directed by the company’s artistic director Ivan Cutting and with an excellent score by Simon Egerton) is a \u2018theatre documentary\u2019, with much of the material generated from a Lottery-funded project to catalogue PDC\u2019s archives and run a parallel oral history program. Many of the key players in City\u2019s expansion, as well as ordinary Peterborians are among those who have provided interviews, and it is their words that have been woven into the script. The resulting authenticity is at the heart of the piece\u2019s quality \u2013 from the divided identity of a boy whose family leave London while he is at primary school, to the nicknames used by PDC employees for prominent civil servants.<\/p>\n

By the time that the Tory\u2019s knifed the new towns in the late 1980s, Ebenezer Howard\u2019s idealism had been tarnished by the realities of swiftly erected settlements and their transplanted populations. Harlow punk band the Newtown Neurotics\u2019 Steve Drewett told the NME<\/a> that new towns were \u2018culturally bankrupt\u2019 and \u2018swamped their population\u2019, while Bill Forsyth\u2019s 1981 film Gregory\u2019s Girl took Cumbernauld as an unrelentingly harsh backdrop for his teenage romance. And yet, as Parkway Dreams makes clear, these uniquely ambitious attempts at social engineering and rational planning, if considered today, have generally created stable, successful and predominantly happy communities.<\/p>\n

The six-strong cast swop characters and narrative threads with aplomb, while the music, dancing and game-show interludes, provide enjoyable light relief in what might be a rather dry tale. As a piece of theatre, it is not without its own shortcomings. For anyone without prior knowledge of the politics and personalities of local government in the 60s and 70s, the sheer number of characters is bewildering, order ativan no prescription<\/a>, and the overlong second half\u2019s gallop up to the present day is needlessly melodramatic. Nevertheless, as a recent, if largely forgotten, contemporary history, it is a joyous romp, and deserves a much wider audience, if only as a reminder of what a genuinely ambitious political program can achieve.<\/p>\n

Parkway Dreams will be performed at Ipswich’s Sir John Mills Theater from 15 – 18 May 2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following review is of the 2013 production. \u00a0It is good to see that the play has been revived in 2015. Musical theatre thrives on improbable subject matter. Who would have thought a board game, animal sociology or a ‘magic’ …<\/p>\n

Posh background: how an old soke became a new town<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1313,"href":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/1313"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}