Best of year for Stage’s expert
Theatre critic and commentator Richard Jordan has voted a Scarborough playwright’s work the best new play of the year.
Writing in The Stage, Jordan named Christopher York’s Build a Rocket, which was set in Scarborough, his favourite.
The play premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre Scarborough earlier this year and was directed by Paul Robinson, artistic director of the Stephen Joseph.
He then went to the Edinburgh Fringe where it won an award.
“However, there it was largely overlooked, as it did not fit with what had become this year’s agenda,” said Jordan.
“Yet its topic of a young single mother surviving and unexpectedly full of hope was in no way less urgent.”
Serena Manteghi played Chris’ heroine Yasmin who brings up her child alone – and successfully negotiates her own life including succeeding at school.
Chris was born and brought up in Scarborough and went to Gladstone Road School and Scarborough Sixth Form College.
He said: On one level Build a Rocket is about teenage pregnancy and motherhood but on another level it presents a protagonist that represents them, someone on stage theycan identify with.
“It is for young women who are mothers or not, from Scarborough or not, someone they look at and see a bit of themselves in.”