January 2007
Blackberry Promises Play Review
Monday, January 01, 2007 by Charles Vance

Adapted from her own novel by Janet Morn Neil

New Theatre Publications

ISBN: 1-84094-536-2

(8m 8f + extra Teddy Boys & Girls if available)

Rights: NTP, 2 Hereford Close, Woolston, Warrington, Cheshire WA1 4HR Tel: 0845 331 3516 Email: plays4theatre@ntlworld.com

Janet Moran Neil trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and the National Youth Theatre. Over the years she has worked for her own companies and the first production of this excursion back into the fifties was staged at the Amersham Community Centre by her own Creative Ink for Actors company. It was subsequently presented at the Pentameters Theatre in Hampstead.

This really is nostalgia with a vengeance as her editors, presenting the text, pose the questions “Do you remember the late 1950’s – ‘Lollipop’ with Millie and ‘Living Doll’ with Cliff on the juke box – the boys in their natty suits with their hair slicked back in Elvis quaffs; the girls in puff-ball skirts – and all of them with one thing in their minds?”

Blackberry Promises both as a novel and now as a very successful play is an evocative exploration of teenage sexuality set in the era that invented the teenager.

It is a superbly crafted piece of nostalgic theatre and as a first play it is an absolute winner and unstintingly thought provoking. But this is not a play for small groups – the text calls for a total of eighteen actors and actresses but in its preface it asks, if possible, for more Teddy boys and Teddy girls. What it so carefully delineates is the birth of the rock and roll era that was to dominate the escalation of a promiscuous society during the ensuing half-century.