Sophie Lancaster was a 20-year-old goth with dreadlocked hair. On 11 August 2007, she and her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, went to talk to a group of teenagers in Stubbylee park in Bacup. The group turned on them. As she tried to protect Maltby from their assault, Lancaster was kicked so viciously that her face was left imprinted with the shape of a metal star from the end of some trainer laces. She never regained consciousness.
First produced on Radio 4, Black Roses is an elegy for Sophie. It intercuts Sylvia Lancaster's recollections of her daughter with Simon Armitage's first-person poetic sequence, which gives the silenced Sophie back her voice. Sophie was a vegetarian and a pacifist. What was it about her and Maltby that so aggravated their attackers? "Something in their lives despises ours. The difference between us is what they can't stand."
Sarah Frankcom and Susan Robert's simple, moving production is played out on a set designed by Amanda Stoodley. This creates a physical separation between the living and the dead, the domestic and the poetic, and cunningly offers a vision of a green and pleasant England where the birds always sing and there are no threatening shadows. What follows reveals that vision as a lie.
Sophie is played with unshowy command by Rachel Austin, and Julie Hesmondhalgh is superb as Sophie's mother, struggling to make sense of her daughter's life and death. The play may not entirely escape its radio origins, but it gains a great deal on stage: Sophie's beauty and difference are underscored because they are visible. "Now let me go. Now carry me home. Now make this known," says Sophie. Black Roses makes it known that hate crimes take many forms.
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