Tin and Fishes

A Cornish Under Milk Wood  –


"Pauline Sheppard's beautiful play for voices uses oral history to express simple but profound truths." ... The Stage.


Come with us to St. Just and meet Miss Procter, “You want history, boy, we’re bloody living in it.” Miss Procter also knows about the weather, “It’s a pheenomeenon up ’ere.” She used to work at Land’s End Radio where knowing the weather mattered. Meet Matthew and Lizzie Richards who got pregnant during the blackouts of the 3 day week in the seventies. Meet their daughter Susie who got out of Cornwall after Geevor closed in the eighties, “Idden nuthen left here.” Re-live David Penhaligon’s speech: “Cornwall needs more than deck-chairs and ice-cream.” The twins from No Go By weren’t even born then, and Jim Eddy down The Miners, he stays in the fifties with his ferrets: “had a ferret once had muscle-definition in his back legs.” Through it all, running higgledy-piggledy like tin through granite, Matthew Richards lives in his garden shed, on the nineteenth level, “only he never coughed so much before.” 


The past becomes a foreign country much sooner than it used to do. In the seventies there were no mobile phones, no home computers, no colour pictures in newspapers, no cds, television closed down at night, and the M5 to Cornwall was still under construction. Change is inevitable; but the way change is managed is important to the lives of communities.