For American audiences unfamiliar with Mark Thomas, one might generalize and introduce him as the working man's John Oliver. It is a reduction of both Thomas and Oliver's decades-long careers in exposing corruption through investigative comedy. However, the distinction aims less to highlight their difference in demeanor, and more how the powers that be have dealt with their criticisms. One is still on the air winning Emmys (WGA strike withstanding); the other sells out fringe theaters. 

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Thomas is best known not as a suit behind a desk, but as a comedy cellar comedian sporting a fatigued simple tee and corded mic in his fist on Channel 4's The Mark Thomas Comedy Product (1996-2002). Like Oliver, Mark Thomas has his own effect on public policy. He has changed laws on tax inheritance and sufficiently agitated London's Metropolitan Police, who unlawfully searched Thomas for being "overly confident" at an arms protest, and whose domestic extremist surveillance database tagged him as a “general rabble rouser and alleged comedian.” Unlike Oliver, who enjoys free rein to criticize corporations under HBO's ad-free subscription model, Mark's rage against the machine was eventually reigned in by Channel 4. Thomas reached a mutual decision to leave the network after it fell short of full support in his campaign for corporate accountability laws, which featured in the final series of Comedy Product. Still, Mark Thomas lives to fight another day in his odyssey to demolish international capitalism, this time in Ed Edward’s Mark Thomas: England & Son (at The Tron Theatre, from September 14 - September 16; on tour through December 09).

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Ed Edwards’ (The Political History of Smack and Crack) deeply felt and darkly funny solo show traces the bloodline of Britain’s stolen youth back to the Empire’s stolen wealth and body count abroad. Though it is the first play that Thomas performs in that he has not written, it is a collaborative effort emerging from characters Mark knew in his childhood, Ed’s lived experience in jail, and a mutual indictment of Thatcher’s wrecking ball demolition of working class futures. 

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Told in two acts, the first is informal and instructional, a direct address built on the testimonies of recovering addicts whom Mark and Ed teach Storytelling in workshops at a center in Manchester. Stories and structure are particularly fundamental tools for those learning to rebuild their lives by taking ownership of them. They begin to drop the lies and open up. They begin to take agency. Together, through the five-act structure of the Greeks, Goodfellas and The Godfather, the group identifies their own turning points and hero’s journeys; they begin to develop their own language for processing their cycles of trauma… and for those we experience after the interval.  

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As a young juvenile named England, Thomas howls through a bender in a dumpster behind a Wetherspoons. Though he wakes just in time to clamber out from the bone crunching fate of a bin lorry, his best friend Paul is not so lucky. Luck is the least of it though. Class and circumstance devoured England and Paul long before this night. With great rage and empathy, Thomas charts England’s undoing back to the trenches of Thatcher’s “shore, sharp shock” detention centers; back to fights around the kitchen table; back to his father’s demolition site, aptly named England & Son; and further back still to his father’s deployment in the former colony of Malaya. A dark tapestry of unspeakable violence at home and abroad ensnares England in a life on the run. During particularly gruesome revelations, Thomas breaks character to check in with the audience. It is the kind of intervention and care that momentarily saves England when he reunites with his former social worker Martha. It is only from a safe distance that he can catch his breath and begin to see the truth lurking in the heart of darkness-- and about the body in the bin lorry. But can he sit with it? And for how long?

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Brought to his knees, England can only beg the question"What happens if I actually hurt him? What happens to me?” 

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The first step towards recovery is acknowledging the problem by naming it. And England? England has a problem. And America? America has a problem too. But how will we name our problems? It requires a language beyond hair rustling and rough housing, bastards and beer. It starts with that smile England desperately needs from his dad. It starts with feeling safe. And it requires more still. 

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England & Son is a coming-of-age story that unlearns the terms of the oppressor’s history books, or “the parent figure that lied to us,” as Sinead O'Connor sings in "Famine." Blame is too short-sighted though. Thomas and Edwards offer a gateway to honesty through empathy and education. Knowledge and understanding is the lifeline out of churning and vicious cycles of violence, fed by patriarchal retribution, a culture of silence, whitewashing and collective memory loss. It is only through learning and processing uncomfortable truths that we can have remembering and grieving. Then healing. So that there can be forgiving. In our own words, on our own terms.

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Megan Murphy (she/her) is a playwright and dramaturg from New York City. She received her BFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and is currently pursuing her MLitt in Playwriting & Dramaturgy at the University of Glasgow. Her areas of interest include postcolonial dramaturgies, modern Irish history, and The Real Housewives universe. She appeared in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’s “Fuck 2016!” segment.