My Black Rose, her mother called her, in homage to her inky eyeliner, dark dreadlocks and black clothes. Sophie Lancaster was a Goth with upwards of 20 piercings in her face, lip and nose and something different down at the core. Or so she liked to think. And yet despite the dog collar round her neck and her pleasure of being singled out in the mosh pit \u201cby a shooting star of saliva from Marilyn Manson\u2019s lips\u201d \u2013 in the words of the poet Simon Armitage \u2013 she was in many ways an old fashioned soul.<\/p>\n
She was happy reading, writing or painting, quietly at home, in the flat she shared with her boyfriend Rob Maltby. The rest of us would probably never have heard of her had the two of them not been, five years ago now, the victims of a brutal attack in a park in Bacup, Lancashire. The pair were kicked and beaten so badly that ambulance staff could not tell which was the man and which was the woman when they arrived on the scene.<\/p>\n
Yet the strength of Armitage\u2019s play Black Roses: The Killing Of Sophie Lancaster, <\/em>which has been showing at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, is that it is about the gentle vitality of her life as much as the savagery of her death. It is the story of a lifetime\u2019s love between a mother and her child and how, as she grew, that twinkling child met her soulmate, a man who was as \u201cperfectly weird\u201d as she, \u201cwith her banshee makeup and hurricane hair\u201d. We get to know her, swiftly but profoundly, through Armitage\u2019s deep shafts of poetic insight, and as a result we feel her loss all the more.<\/p>\n \u201cI stand outside this house of justice, not as Sophie\u2019s mother, but as her voice,\u201d said Sylvia Lancaster when two 15 and 16 year old boys were convicted of murdering Sophie. Simon Armitage has become a voice of a more transcendent kind.\u00a0 And yet there is a massive emotional vortex at the centre of his poetic drama. It whirls around the question of why a gang of binge-drinking teenage yobs would, without the slightest provocation, inflict such ghastly violence on a pair of kindly innocents.<\/p>\n Armitage gives Sophie thoughts about testosterone and pent-up hate but he \u2013 like the rest of us \u2013 cannot explain why the studs in her lips, the rings in her ears or something in her vegetarian pacifist lifestyle arouses such a level of fury and depth of anger. The killers do not even know her name and yet detest every atom of who she is: \u201cSomething in their lives despises ours. The difference between us is what they can\u2019t\u00a0stand.\u201d It was behaviour, a judge said, that \u201cdegrades humanity itself\u201d.<\/p>\n