First stage adaptation of Britain's best selling author, includes humour, intrigue, tragedy, and love. A powerful drama, set against the harsh and turbulent background of poverty and class distinction in Tyneside at the beginning of the last century. It tells the story of one family's fight for physical and moral survival in the squalor of the dockyard slums of the Fifteen Streets.

At the centre of the play is the apparently impossible love affair between rugged but romantic docker, John O'Brien and Mary Llewellyn, schoolteacher and daughter of a weathly shipyard owner. Their love unites them, but the Fifteen Streets and the many characters that inhabit those streets threaten to stand in their way.

Images on this page are based on paintings by Christine Angell