The Gorbals, Glasgow, 1931. Two working-class Jews, the best of friends, dream on a park bench. Morris wants a revolution; Alec wants to feed the pigeons. Spanning four decades of British life, Bread and Butter is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of an eccentric friendship. Mixing salmon sandwiches with talk of war and women, two men search for a slice of happiness amidst the rubble of the 20th century.

Written by one of Scotland’s most important writers, Bread and Butter is a highly amusing and touching play about how ordinary people engage with the big political picture. Cecil Philip Taylor was born in Glasgow in 1929, the son of an immigrant Jewish family, but lived in Northumberland for the last twenty years of his life.

Taylor wrote plays for television and the theatre, many of which were premiered at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre during one of its most prolific eras and he co-founded the Live Theatre in Newcastle. During his life, he wrote more than seventy plays including A Nightingale Sang, Operation Elvis (Traverse and Tricycle) and Good produced by the RSC. Taylor had tremendous range and a prophetic vision, often dealing with major events through the eyes of those who lived through them, with a sly and sometimes black humour. He died in Newcastle in 1981.
Bread and Butter was directed by Mark Rosenblatt, Artistic Director of Dumbfounded Theatre who previously directed The Circle for Oxford Stage Company.
An excellent cast included Michael Wilson (The Inland Sea for Oxford Stage Company and The School of Night directed by Jack Shepherd at Chichester) as Alec, Gerald Lepkowski (M.A.D. at the Bush and In Arabia We’d All Be Kings at Hampstead) as Morris, Pauline Turner (Mill on the Floss for Shared Experience and TV’s Martin Chuzzlewit) as Miriam and Jayne McKenna (Front Page at Chichester and Macbeth in the West End) as Sharon.

“Sensitively directed by Mark Rosenblatt, beautifully designed and well acted”.
The Observer

**** Financial Times

**** The Times

*** The Independent

For more information please visit
www.oxfordstage.co.uk and www.tricycle.co.uk