Greenstick Boy

“Punk is dead, they buried the corpse under the Eleanor Cross,” spills Greenstick Boy’s ebullient heroine as her reminiscences drift towards the sobering era of Thatcher’s Britain. It is one of countless moments of lyrical brilliance that hangs throughout the monologue play like a violin chord.

Greensticks refer to the soft, pliable bones of a child which can gain subtle fractures that pass unnoticed. D is narrator M’s long-lost soulmate, caught eternally in the purgatory of the latter’s sad reveries, remembered for his biting humour, his anarchic charisma and his careless heroin addiction. D is far away and out of touch, and this is M’s long-delayed love letter to him, her invisibly wounded greenstick boy.

With pithy exuberance she recalls the brittle milestones from their past: precious, precarious moments they shared amidst the lawlessness of East London in the 70s and their fleeting encounters during the hangover years of the 80s. She knows the letter won’t reach him, but in chaptering her bittersweet memories of him, bids to return the gesture of the compilation tape he once gave her that ignited the fiery days of her punk-marked youth.

Award-winning television actor Maggie Cronin paints a deeply poignant picture of a wild love and the throbbing nostalgic pains that survive it, through an affecting performance that never too eagerly boasts her own script’s frequently brilliant flourishes. Greenstick Boy is a lesson in storytelling and a most flattering ode to Cronin’s career as both actor and writer.