Dirty Old Town, 20-25 September, Greater Manchester Police Museum @GMFringe

            New stage-play Dirty Old Town explores the life and work of police detective Jerome Caminada in Victorian Manchester, thought to be the real-life inspiration behind Arthur Conan Doyle's great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.

Manchester-based writer Rob Johnston has had more than 30 plays staged professionally, won the 2011 Kings Cross Award for New Writing for Einstein’s Daughter and Dark Satanic won Best Drama at Greater Manchester Fringe in 2017.
For Dirty Old Town, Johnston has drawn on historical records and personal memoirs to follow Detective Caminada into a Manchester underworld of con-artists, forgers, medical quacks, imposters, pickpockets, and revolutionary anarchists, dispensing single-minded and unwavering justice as he goes.

But in nineteenth-century Manchester there is a growing clamour for fairness in a world that is anything but fair, and Detective Caminada finds himself entangled in the battles that came to define nineteenth-century England, as the working-classes fought tirelessly for their rights.

Caught between his sense of justice and theirs, England's most successful policeman is pushed to the limits of everything he has ever believed.

It is said that Jerome Caminada was an inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. 

But Caminada was no pipe-smoking violin-playing amateur-sleuth. And despite having a surname nobody he met could pronounce, Detective Sergeant Jerome Caminada was something everybody he met could understand: a Manc.

This play is very much about the culture and heritage of the city of Manchester and just how multicultural a city it was in the late 1800s.

Its main character was of half Irish and half Italian heritage and he represents the ethnic minorities of a large population of Irish and Italian settlers.

Dirty Old Town stars Eddie Capli, who was recently in a modern-day Manchester detective series on Radio 4 called Stone, and Ryan Mulvey.

They are directed by Malcolm Raeburn, senior lecturer in media performance at University of Salford, as well as an acting and devising career in television and theatre. 

Supported by Arts Council England and Dirty Old Town will be staged by PACT Productions in the Greater Manchester Police Museum, Monday 20 - Saturday 25 September at 7pm, as part of Greater Manchester Fringe. 

Tickets: greatermanchesterfringe.co.uk

Taken on: August 29, 2021

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Sets appears in: • GMFringe September 2021 • Dirty Old Town

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