race issues
Chinonyerem Odimba
People often ask how long a play takes to make its way out of you. And it’s always a valid question because no matter how beautiful, soft, joyful, or short a play is, there is a wrestling match that takes place between the idea lodging itself somewhere in you, and it turning into words that actors can have fun getting to know. With Black Love, opening this week at the Kiln Theatre, that journey from the story embedding itself to a rehearsal script took almost seven years.When I was first commissioned in 2019 to write a play for Paines Plough, I had no idea what it was I wanted to write. Or Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park arrived at London’s Royal Court like a blazing comet in 2010, a bold kind of satire about race relations that was both sassy and savvy.Now it’s back for a run at the Park Theatre, N1. Twelve years on, we have learnt to don a tin hat and duck whenever somebody enters the minefield of other people’s sensitivities. But Norris’s play is a reminder that it’s possible to barrel straight into no-man’s land and lob grenades from there at targets on all sides, to hilarious and provocative effect.The piece is structured like a Rohrschach blot: two acts set a half-century Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Merchant of Venice is a comedy, you say? Shakespeare, as ever, refuses to be confined to convenient boxes, his best plays’ extraordinary pliability and longevity a testament to the piercing eye he cast towards the slings and arrows that assail humankind. More than most of his works, The Merchant of Venice requires a director to take a stance, especially these days, so as to send the audience in a chosen direction. This is not unique - no text can. nor should, be sacred - but those decisions bubble closer to the surface in The Merchant than perhaps any other play in the canon. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” the John Ford scholar Tag Gallagher quietly observes in the penetrating – and deeply moving – video essay he contributes to Masters of Cinema’s Blu-ray disc of Ford’s 1953 masterpiece The Sun Shines Bright. It’s good advice. There’s plenty in the movie for cancel culture advocates to sink their teeth into – should they be so blinkered. Gallagher asserts here, as he did in his book on Ford, that the film might well have been titled Intolerance, such is its condemnation of bigotry.The Sun Shines Bright, which Ford claimed in 1968 was his favourite of his films Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“You could read at home,” says Bettina (Anoushka Chadha), Year 10, her school uniform perfectly pressed, hair neatly styled. “You could be an annoying little shit at home,” retorts her sister Asha (Safiyya Ingar), Year 13, all fire and fury in Doc Martens and rainbow headphones. Two Billion Beats, Sonali Bhattacharyya’s new play for the Orange Tree, draws us in with snappy lines and raucous energy before delivering an emotional wallop.Asha is waiting to go home until their mum has left for work so she doesn’t have to talk about her history essay. She got 85%, but her mum only cares about the Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“If you want romance,” the cast of Emma Rice’s new version of Wuthering Heights say in unison just after the interval, “go to Cornwall.” They’re using the modern definition of romance, of course – Emily Brontë’s novel is full of the original meaning of "romantic", much wilder and more dangerous than anything Ross Poldark gets up to.Rice’s anarchic adaptation preserves that feral quality, with the Moor itself telling the doomed love story of Cathy (Lucy McCormick) and Heathcliff (Ash Hunter), but doesn’t do enough to keep up its energy.The opening is more Kafkaesque than Brontësque (though Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Conundrum is a tricky play. Written and directed by Paul Anthony Morris, founder of Crying in the Wilderness Productions, it’s an extended meditation on Blackness and what it means to live in a racist society. Anthony Ofoegbu is the star of the show, but his mesmerising performance isn’t enough to make sense out of Morris’s inscrutable script.Fidel (Ofoegbu, pictured below) is decluttering, shredding documents he doesn’t need anymore. He stumbles across a page of biology notes, and starts testing himself on parts of the body: hypothalamus, oesophagus, carotid canal. He scrawls the words in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the absolute highpoints of new writing in the past couple of years has been the Death of England trilogy. Written by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, these three brilliant monologues have not only explored vital questions of race and racism, identity and belonging, but have also provided a record of theatre-going before, during and after the pandemic lockdown.From the first episode, which was staged live at the National Theatre in January 2020, to the second which only had one performance but was then streamed in October 2020, to this final part, which is a film, the story of fractious Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can we turn off the script and simply leave the music to do its soul-stirring bit? That's likely to be a not uncommon response to Get Up Stand Up!, which gives Bob Marley much the same biomusical treatment currently on view in Tina across town (and in New York). The difference, of course, is that Tina Turner is soon to be 82, whereas Marley died 40 years ago, at the preposterously premature age of 36. All the more reason to be reminded of both the music, and the message, of the Jamaican legend whose work comes with an inbuilt call and response, as was movingly evident on press Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“Careful, there’s a hole in the floor.” The warning’s an unusual one, passed along conscientiously by the stewards at the door of the tiny Orange Tree Theatre.The hole in question is long and angular and will soon be filled with water, stretching around one side of the pristine white set of Rice, a new play by Australian-Hmong writer Michele Lee. It’s an intimate two-hander about immigration and belonging, directed ably by Matthew Xia – but, like its characters, it’s suffering an identity crisis.Our heroines are two women of colour: Nisha (Zainab Hasan, pictured below), a young executive at Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"I can't sleep": So goes the fateful opening line of White Noise, the Suzan-Lori Parks play disturbing enough to spark many a restless night in playgoers who are prepared to take its numerous provocations on board. To do so requires various suspensions of disbelief, one quite substantial, on the way to a finish that, in Polly Findlay's Bridge Theatre UK premiere, comes at least 20 minutes earlier than I recall from this play's Off Broadway debut in spring 2019. Comparative speed (the play still feels overwritten) isn't all that's changed in the trans-Atlantic crossing of this portrait of Read more ...
Bill Mayblin
The opening sentence of Andrea’s 2010 historical novel The Long Song is in the voice of Thomas Kinsman, who is introducing the reader to his mother, July."The book you are now holding in your hand was born of a craving," Kinsman declares. "My mama had a story – a story that lay so fat within her breast that she felt impelled, by some force that was mightier than her own will, to relay this tale to me."I have always felt that if you substitute "Andrea Levy" for "my mama" that we have a pretty accurate description here of Andrea’s own literary career. The Long Song was the last of the Read more ...