Johnnie Quarrell - Outside Alie St (2)
Steve Gooch’s East end version of Romeo and Juliet, Back-Street Romeo was set in modern day East End of London.
You can access the script of this play via the British Library’s MPS Modern Playscripts Collection.
By this time Billy Colvill had become one of the theatre’s stalwarts and invited me back. I’d observed when researching The Motor Show in Dagenham how, if you wanted to make contact with trade unionists, you went to a certain pub on a certain day where at a certain time you’d meet your contact. People who’d worked as bar staff told me this was also how the Kray organis-ation operated. So I imagined Billy as a Romeo from a trade unionist family, and Chloe Salaman as Juliet from a gangster family, and let the old story be played out against these different working-class traditions. The play got only fair reviews, and I got some stick locally for allegedly likening trade unionists to gangsters (when it was the difference I wanted brought home!)
Click here to read the full interview with Steve Gooch.
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