Last modified on Mon 21 Dec 2020 05.45 EST
Gin Craze is set during the 18th-century moral panic about working-class women drinking a newly invented, potent form of alcohol: gin. They not only drank it, they found a new economic freedom in selling it and worshipped it as a semi-divine “mother”. Today we still talk about mother’s ruin. Though the history of gin is well documented, the voices of the working-class women who drank it and made their living selling it were never recorded. The play tries to imagine who those women were, struggling in a brutal London.
Lydia, a pimp, meets Mary, a castoff servant, and soon their journey with gin begins. Through their friendship and fortunes, the play traces the vicissitudes of the gin craze from the perspective of the London street. Also featured in the play is the novelist Henry Fielding, who incarnated himself as a magistrate and pitted his last energies into stamping out the practice of the poor drinking gin.