Bread & Roses
Oldham Coliseum Theatre

EX-MILL town Oldham is the ideal location for this staging of Ian Kershaw's new play about the 1912 mill workers' strike led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the “Wobblies,” in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

The IWW sought to recruit the new working classes into their union which included immigrants, women and, unusually for the time, black people and the production captures the hopes and dreams of a group of workers who refused to accept low pay and servitude in the powerhouses of the US economy.

Breaking the censorship of the local press, the IWW launched a national appeal and achieved publicity across the US when several hundred strikers’ children were stopped by the police at Lawrence railway station as they tried to leave the town to go to temporary homes provided by union members and their parents were brutally attacked.