Job For The Boy

A play about class and family expectations. It has nothing to do with earning capacity or brains or usefulness, but prestige of the 'clean job'. It is often the ambition of many working-class parents to see their sons elevated to offices or banks. Maggie Lomax is the anxious spokeswoman for these aspirations. She has seen her boy David win a university scholarship and graduate with a degree fitting him, she is confident, for a clean and respectable career possibly at the Town Hall, which is evidently her ideal of respectability. But David is of a new generation that has not inherited the old snobberies; he comes home with the dismaying determination to take a technical post in a coalmine.