'I bet it's dead clean in Ikea. I bet they have a proper breakroom with a fridge just for water, and an actual coffee machine. I bet they don't even have mice.'

The apprenticeships are only meant to last a year - there were never any guarantees beyond that. For Ava, Liv, Mason and Trent, they're just trying to get through the day. They don't know why there's an endless stream of strangers passing through, but no-one ever tells them anything. In a couple of months they'll be kicked out anyway, and God knows what happens after that. Who's looking out for them?

Scissors is a play about family, heritage and legacy, and is part of Chris Bush's triptych of plays about a Sheffield manufacturing family, Rock / Paper / Scissors. The three plays were first performed simultaneously with the same cast moving between three theatres in Sheffield – the Crucible, the Lyceum and the Studio – as part of Sheffield Theatres' fiftieth birthday celebrations in 2022.



'Delicately moving and raucously funny'



'Scissors has a light touch, and there are some moments of proper comedy... the focus here is on the quartet of apprentices - it's a pleasure to spend time with them and to see the effect that the plot developments in the other plays [Rock and Paper] have had on their characters'



'The wit flies with the welder sparks and Scissors asks urgent, political questions about the gulf between the generations and the future of work'



'There are laughs-a-plenty but above all else Scissors has a really big heart'



'[Contains] one of the most fascinating creatures I've seen on stage this year'