Maggie And me & Greenapple Street Blues: Best Dressed Bully; Thunder And Lightning; Hockey Stuck; Crime Wave in Room 7; the Best Tree You Can be; ... Substitute Mother; the More Things Change

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At Pride, I had an intimate moment with a young guy in his early twenties who was beaming that a whole family were at the festival.

Out of poverty, brutality and prejudice, Damian Barr builds something riveting, touching and painfully funny.On the one hand Damian Barr despises her, her removing of even the smallest things that might help the poor - she earned the name Milk Snatcher for stopping free milk in all schools, for the strikes that hurt so many in her years as PM, including his father, and her attitude towards homosexuals. The Irish Times, says: 'A story so powerful it’s a useful reminder of how fiction can illuminate the indignities visited upon those the world has mistreated then forgotten. Three pages at the start, five at the end, and a Thatcher quote as an epigraph for each chapter somehow weren’t enough to convince me that the framing device was necessary or apt. Damian’s experiences skip from the sad to the joyful, the funny, the silly, the universality of being a kid. A poignant and painfully funny memoir about growing up gay in Thatcher’s Britain, it won Sunday Times Memoir of the Year, and was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.

To say I loved it doesn't begin to convey the mixture of emotions - tears, laughter, anger - I felt while reading it. He discovers that stories can save your life and — in spite of violence, strikes, AIDS, and Clause 28 — manages to fall in love dancing to Madonna in Glasgow's only gay club.The book has a fantastic sense of time and place, and the sort of Scotland you don’t often read about (a particular treat for me as I grew up there at the same time as him).

A childhood growing up in 1980's Scotland (Not Britain) where Maggie Thatcher's `reign' is about to bring the demise of the town of Motherwell.Despite the harshness of your hometown and the misery and inner confusion, the hope and the beauty shines through. Read the book from cover to cover and believe me it is at times harrowing to accept the vivid images Barr creates. In a world that remains hostile to difference, I’m so moved to have Damian and James’s trust to now lead the creation of a production that holds hope and healing at its heart - for me, for us, and for every audience member we’ll meet on the great big adventure ahead.