ON THE OUT

2003

Writer: Andrew Sherlock

Producer: Rebecca Hodgson

Director: Matt Bloom

Starting:  Kevin Harvey, Ged Hunter, Wyllie Longmore. 

Upon being released from prison, a once carjacking teenager is forced to face the parents of the child he killed five years ago. 

Winner of the Royal Theatre Society Award for 'Best Program in the North West' 

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McKENNA has done his four and is getting ready to go home.  Prison suited him, in many ways it was safe.  Back in the city or rather his ‘city within the city’ he is known.  Some would say marked.  There are people waiting for him and he knows it. That’s what happens in tight communities of hard cities, everyone knows something.  Whether it is true or not is another matter.  A lot to deal with for a young man of barely twenty-one years.

When he was sixteen McKENNA knocked down a toddler and killed him.  For a supreme car robber, joy-rider, twocker even he appreciated the irony that he was on a motorbike that he had saved up long and hard to buy at the time.  It was when he was at his most legal that he had committed his most serious offence.  Previously he’d always come out of scrapes, smash-ups and chases smiling.  That’s how he’d earned his name as the luckiest lad.  But at the young and tender age of sixteen his luck had well and truly run out.

McKENNA is a mixed-race young man from the heart of an inner-city black community.  THEO the little boy he killed was a neighbour’s son.  One of his own.  He knew the family and they all know him.  After the counselling, the solitude and the nightmares inside McKENNA has decided on the first thing he is going to do when he gets out.  He is going to go round and see the parents.  Talk.  Apologise.  Listen.  The question is will MIRIAM and TONY want to see him?  It is one thing to commit an offence, but against your own and trying to return there is another.

MIRIAM and TONY have become famous in the neighbourhood.  They were not satisfied with the flowers taped to the lamppost near where it happened and got a Pelican Crossing put in.  They are now leading advocates of road safety in the area.  But really, they want their son back.

This is the story of McKENNA’s return to his city.  And like many people his city is the few streets around where he grew up.  To people like McKENNA, those are the streets that matter.

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