She could teach more folk round ‘ere about what’s bloody well important in their lives - when it comes down to it. What matters . . . That precious bit of you that gets buried in shit, and she’s there clearin’ it all away.

Delie is special and she’s won a trophy for picking up litter from the mayor. Every summer she goes on her holidays to her Aunty Brenda who runs a women’s domestic abuse refuge in a Yorkshire mining village. Delie and her Aunty Brenda and a pawnbroker called George who wears a dress are The Flannelettes - a Motown tribute band.

Delie is in her twenties but with a mental age of ten; when she meets Roma - who used to live on the streets in Rotherham - the two become best friends, sharing each others' secrets.

By the award-winning writer of The Glee Club, The Flanelettes is a tough, uncompromising play which looks at love and violence in a shattered community, all playing to a bittersweet soundtrack of Sixties soul.

Cameron handles with sensitivity issues of grooming and horrendous abuse and the bruising bleakness is countered by uplifting notes of hope. * The Times *
a chilling portrait of the tragic decline of South Yorkshire's mining towns and villages. * Guardian *
Cameron's richly satisfying work is full of warm, flawed, utterly human characters and so it proves again * Evening Standard *

Richard Cameron was born in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. His plays include Haunted Flowers, Strugglers (winner 1988 Sunday Times Playwriting Award), The Moon's the Madonna (shortlisted for the Independent Theatre Award and winner 1989 Company Award at NSDF), Can't Stand Up for Falling Down (winner 1990 Sunday Times Playwriting Award, Scotsman Fringe First, 1990 Independent Theatre Award), Pond Life, Not Fade Away, The Mortal Ash, Almost Grown, Seven, The Glee Club, and Gong Donkeys (2004). His first television play Stone Scissors Paper won the inaugural BBC Television Dennis Potter Play of the Year Award in 1995.