Anthem for Dissatisfaction

Playwright Gina Donnelly says there was a time when poverty was too often depicted in a mocking way. She offers the antidote in her new play, Anthem for Dissatisfaction, which is touring to venues across the south-east this autumn.

It comes promised as a euphoric, working-class celebration of the power of live music, teenage angst, sibling rivalry and love – a coming-of-age anthem for anyone who ever wanted more.

The piece follows Sarah and Jamie (Emily Lamey and Simon Sweeney) from boisterous 11-year-olds to the end of their 20s as they contemplate their futures. In the 2007 credit crunch they are growing up in Belfast with a shared obsession with music and the weight of life on the breadline. Along the way, rock, pop, and punk rail against austerity Britain and a failing government – to a soundtrack of bands including Oasis, The Jam, Thin Lizzy, Bruce Springsteen and Sam Fender and many more, all screaming at the state of the nation.

Dates on the tour include November 10 at 7.45pm at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford; November 19 at 7.30pm in the Connaught Studio, Worthing; and November 21 at 8pm in The Nest at Chichester Festival Theatre. Tickets from the venues.

Writer Gina, of SkelpieLimmer productions, co-directs alongside Brassneck Theatre artistic director Tony Devlin.

“There were multiple moments that went into the making of this play,” Gina recalls. “I put down the title for it years ago. I don't know how it came to me but it just came to me as a phrase and it stayed with me. And it just summed up the connecting link between all the bands that started my love of music when I was a teenager.”

Going to gigs with her sister was another factor in the play’s genesis: “Me and my sister went to see Sam Fender at a big festival in Belfast in 2023. It rained the whole time! Me and my sister were having a conversation about how poor people wrote the best songs. I was thinking about all the music that meant so much to us when we were growing up, and Sam Fender was the first relatively new person, who wasn't around when we were teenagers, who meant the same kind of thing to us.”

The story revolves around two siblings. Gina was always going to have an older sister in the piece. The role which has become Jamie in the production was not specified gender-wise to start with: “For a long time it could have been either depending who came along to audition but then we saw Simon and we just felt he had a really good connection with Emily. We felt that there was a real connection between them. It's really hard to cast siblings especially brother and sister but they seemed to have a real chemistry, and they both had a really strong understanding of what the play was about. And they also had fun together in audition, and that was really important to us. It's about having fun.

“It's a play about poverty and the cost of living crisis but the point is that it is also joyful. I wanted it to be a version of working-class life that is not seen very much. It was really important to me that they both had real intelligence and were both really funny. What was important to me is that when I was growing up in the world, poverty became a kind of punchline. That's how it felt. It felt like I was surrounded by people and things on TV that were laughing at poverty. I wanted to make a show where it was clear poverty and intelligence very much went together.”