The Accrington Pals by Peter Whelan is a moving and hard-hitting 1982 play set in Accrington during the first few years of the First World War.

While the story itself is fiction, the background is reality. “The Pals” were formed and fought just as they are described as doing in the play. It looks at the story of the innocent and enthusiastic men who volunteered their services to their country after Kitchener's calls for a New Army. Their experiences of life on the Western Front are contrasted with the women who are left behind in Accrington, women who come together as friends when facing sexual deprivation, as well as being thrown into the social changes that came along with the absence of many men.

Abandonment by Kate Atkinson is a play about love, death, identity and evolution. Atkinson is one of the UK’s most popular internationally acclaimed novelists whose Behind The Scenes at the Museum won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year. In her play which premiered in 2000 at the Edinburgh Festival, Richmond’s AS Theatre Studies students tackle a complex mix of social comedy and family drama reminding us that the past is not as far away as we think.

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