The contractor

On the grounds of an English country house, a crew of workmen puts up a marquee for a wedding. Their task is straightforward: they erect the tent, dress it for the celebration, and then take it down again. Storey, however, builds the drama from small, unremarkable details of daily work, and through them the play probes the quiet resentments, affection and friction among these men.

The tent works as a central image. As the job unfolds, it comes to stand for far larger concerns, including the strain within a family, the rigid order of social class, the decline of the British Empire and the broader foundations of Western civilisation. Storey keeps the dialogue plain and offhand, yet an unease runs beneath it throughout, and his restraint in what he chooses to show is especially precise.

The play is also a study of craftsmanship and belonging. It considers the satisfaction of skilled labour, the bonds that form a community, and what is lost when those bonds break. David Storey, who was also a novelist and whose fiction often drew on working-class northern life, wrote the play as a quiet, poetic parable.