karen brown scriptwriter
REVIEWS
Word on the Street
Reviews for what they are worth
TONTINE - R4
The Stage
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Karen Brown’s play Tontine was visceral in its evocation of the endless financial struggles of classes of people who, unless they win the lottery or The X Factor (in fact, scrub the latter) will always be the have-nots.
A young couple, charged with looking after a community savings plan, dip into the funds, although they know that retribution from their own friends and neighbours will be merciless.
At the core of the play, representing old school values, was the matriarch, Marie, played by Alison Steadman in a stunning performance of mounting bewilderment, anger and leadership.
It was a grim Northern week on Radio 4’s Afternoon Theatre. Tuesday’s Tontine, by Karen Brown, was joltingly realistic, true to both characters and situation. A tontine, for those who didn’t grow up with them, is a money lending club. Its members save a bit every week and draw it out at Christmas, an arrangement dating back to the hungry 1930s before ordinary people had bank accounts and long before credit cards were invented. Tontines are still useful to people (and there are many) who can’t save any other way. You have to be able, however, to trust whoever runs them. This play was about what happens when you can’t. On It (Friday) was about life in a Lancashire town left behind when the mills closed. Money’s tight, drugs are rife, the only way to feed a habit is by stealing. Written, directed and narrated by Tony Pitts, it was about a teenage addict’s attempt to get off it by joining a boxing club. It had life written through its every character, scene and line. Both plays added depth to the rosy glow the BBC is currently projecting around Salford. They shocked but, absolutely, they convinced.
The Independent
Tontine, in the Afternoon Play slot, was both gripping and bang up to date. Karen Brown's play was based around a Liverpool-based tontine scheme, where people give Christmas savings to a community collector. Anne played by Jess Schofield, reveals she has been dipping into the pot and owes thousands to the neighbours. Alison Steadman was magnificent as the mother-in-law and the harshness of the scouse accents was an exact match for the uncomfortable subject matter. The idea of the "tonny" must have been new to some of the Radio 4 audience and Anne's rationale for stealing was pitiful and compelling in its detail. She wanted, "just some things some people have all the time". "I had a pedicure with little tiny fish biting at the skin of me feet and a hot stone massage, with my hair done in a fancy style. Three hundred quid! How selfish is that?"
THE RAIN HAS STOPPED - BBC 1
Radio Times
Most people come back from their holiday with a straw donkey or a box of fudge, but
widow Liz (Sheila Hancock) returns from a fortnight in Torquay with someone her daughter
refers to as a‘geriatric Asian”... Powerfully written by Karen Brown and beautifully acted.
Jane Rackham
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https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/showbiz-news/moving-on-919646
SKINHEAD MOONSTOMP
THE SHRINE - BBC 1
The Stage - Harry Venning
The Shrine, was a bittersweet tale of death, bereavement, loss, guilt and property values. Matthew Kelly and Barbara Flynn starred as homeowners John and Carol, keen to realise the highest price for the property that will fund their change of life, who witness a fatal accident from their bedroom window.
The couple’s initial compassion for the grieving widow begins to subside when the floral tribute she builds outside their house has a negative effect on potential buyers. Worse still, the local community embraces the shrine as a focus for their own grief, swelling it considerably in size and threatening to make it a permanent feature. And as John and Carol’s estate agent is quick to point out, nothing dampens enthusiasm for a property quite like an enormous memento mori on the doorstep.
Karen Brown’s concise script twists between high farce, dark humour and searing tragedy as it chronicles an essentially decent couple’s attempts to exercise a modest degree of self-interest while besieged by collective sorrow, self-righteous indignation and moral opprobrium.
Great performances from the whole cast, with Kelly and Flynn outstanding as the hapless householders eventually forced to take matters into their own hands.
The Independent - Tom Sutcliffe
You probably missed Moving On, being go-getting types who don't lie on the sofa at 2.15 in the afternoon, eating Sugar Puffs and flicking desultorily between Classic Mastermind and Dickinson's Real Deal. What's more, you're probably not all that worried about having missed Moving On, daytime drama not exactly having a premium status. Moving On is slightly different though.
It was originally created by Jimmy McGovern, a writer with a real genius for ferreting out the small dramas that loom large in most people's lives. He also has a talent for finding writers who can do the same thing and although his name no longer appears on the series credits, his thumbprint is still, I think, detectable in its texture – the way it can mix comic bathos with grief, and trivial embarrassments with deeper shame. Yesterday's The Shrine", was built around a commonplace melodrama that has featured before in the series – the stress of selling a house. John and Carol have been trying to sell theirs for sometime and a sharp edge is beginning to creep into their bickering difference of opinion about the right selling price. Their row was just one of three that were intercut at the beginning of Karen Brown's script, the others being a heated argument over a taxi fare and a spat between a wife and her husband.
And all three knot together when the husband storms out, walks straight in front of the agitated cab-driver and is killed. Everybody feels guilty here except John, who saw the accident, but his turn is coming, because the grieving widow starts to build a roadside shrine on the grass verge immediately in front of his house. A football scarf is tied around the tree, and laminated photographs, and flowers and candles begin to stack up.
John and Carol are sympathetic at first, but then it becomes clear that having one of these pious rubbish dumps at the bottom of your drive doesn't exactly make a great first impression to potential buyers. "It'll be all right," says John. "Once he's buried all this'll stop." Unfortunately, the dead man is cremated and has his ashes scattered at his favourite football ground, so the shrine remains. And Brown's script nicely captures the pinch the couple find themselves in.
How exactly do you tell a weeping woman that her memories have become an eyesore? The tyranny of grief, its power of diktat, trumps all other considerations. Things come to a head when John and Carol temporarily tidy away the shrine for a house viewing, only to have the widow arrive five minutes later and launch into a shrieking denunciation of the unknown vandal. "It wasn't hurting anyone, was it?" she weeps. "No. Of course not," Carol reassures her, now in agonies of guilt herself. It's all resolved not tritely, since the penultimate scene is a nearly worldless montage of unresolved grief and social shame. But charitably enough to reassure you that life can absorb some cracks without entirely shattering.
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RTS Nominated in the Best Scriptwriting Category