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21 September, 2009

Punk Rock

Lyric Hammersmith, 3 – 26 September 2009

Reviewed for the London Theatre Blog

Each scene of Simon Stephens’ Punk Rock is abruptly curtailed by an uncomfortably loud belch of feedback and a mangled excerpt from a rock song. By the second hour, each of these sonic interjections sends ripples of uneasy laughter through the stalls. The whole audience is on edge, braced for a shock. Stephens’ clutch of Stockport sixth formers, seen between lessons in Paul Wills’ towering, forbidding onstage library, seem incapable of reining in the impulse to probe and prod and push one another’s boundaries; everyone in the auditorium can tell someone’s going to snap.

By the time the anticipated act of violence occurs, Stephens has laid out a whole smorgasbord of potential contributing factors: unrequited teenage love; body image issues; the spectre of trouble at home; alcohol; an environment in which parents and teachers allow sixth formers to believe a C grade in an English mock means they’ll “never get out of Stockport”; plus Bennet Francis (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), a bully whose aloof disregard for those he hurts is worse by far than actual malice, and whose effect on the group debunks with ease that maxim about sticks and stones so beloved of adult authority figures.

Yet Stephens’ real achievement is that despite all the factors presented to us, when our minds reach, as they tend to do, for a simple, catch-all way to explain the tragedy, there isn’t one. It doesn’t even feel satisfactory to conclude, “it was probably a combination of all those things”.

As an examination of the overly simplistic adult tendency to classify teenage behaviour as the direct result of easily identifiable causes like alcohol, pornography and violent media, Punk Rock delivers; though no alternative theory is forthcoming, unless you count, “some people are just broken”.

Stephens’ love of language carries him away into the odd overwrought line, and Director Sarah Frankcom’s love of Stephens’ language leads to characters delivering extended passages straight out front, while the characters they’re supposedly addressing slouch behind them in a symmetrical chorus-line chevron. The script is excellent – funny in a terrifying and guilt-ridden kind of way – and it deserves to be placed centre stage, but such unnatural blocking actually distracts from the words. Or is that too simple, too immediate an explanation…?

Written by Simon Stephens

Crew includes Sarah Frankcom (director), Paul Wills (designer), Philip Gladwell (lighting designer) and Pete Rice (sound designer)

Cast includes Nicholas Banks (Nicholas Chatman), Ghazaleh Golpira (Lucy Francis), Henry Lloyd-Hughes (Bennet Francis), Harry McEntire (Chadwick Meade), Jessica Raine (Lilly Cahill), Tom Sturridge (William Carlisle), Katie West (Tanya Gleason), Simon Wolfe (Dr Richard Harvey) and Sophie Wu (Cissy Franks)

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18 July, 2009

The Ultimate Critics’ Pick of the Fringe 2009 – part 2

Written for The Collective Review, 17 July 2009

Previously on The Ultimate Critics’ Pick of the Fringe 2009:

The 13 most anticipated shows of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as collectively selected by five major newspapers and magazines, are: Barflies, Beachy Head, A British Subject, The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church, Morecambe, Palace of the End, Sea Wall, Suckerville and The World’s Wife, with two votes each; Blondes, Orphans and Theatre for Breakfast, with three votes each; and the most hyped show in the lead-up to August, with four out of five possible votes, is The Girls of Slender Means.

What it all means

The Scotsman’s Andrew Eaton has it right when he says, “these are all pretty safe bets”.  The shortlist is awash with big names, including Fringe First Award winner Daniel Kitson (The Interminable Suicide…), Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy (The World’s Wife), Olivier Award winning playwright Simon Stephens (Sea Wall), famed Scottish novelist Muriel Spark (The Girls…) and celebrity Denise van Outen (Blondes), all of whom are guaranteed to put bums on seats.

It would be easy to construe this as evidence of conservative taste in the mainstream media – especially as the articles claim to list the best shows in the festival, not the ones that will probably do well at the box office.

In actual fact, the shortlist only shows up one paper as unadventurous.  Most of the individual articles list some surefire hits alongside some more radical choices – an attempt to show experimental Fringe spirit while still correctly predicting this year’s biggest shows, deflecting accusations of fuddidudditude on the one hand and poor knowledge of the industry on the other.  A radical choice wouldn’t be radical if another paper tipped it too, so none of the radical choices made it to the shortlist.

The Evening Standard’s Fiona Mountford, however, didn’t make any radical choices.  Not only that, but she’s the only list-maker not to have tipped The Girls of Slender Means.  Her list manages to be composed entirely of safe bets while failing to include the safest bet of them all.

The figures suggest Andrew Eaton occupies the opposite end of the conservative–radical spectrum:  72% of his picks fall outside the shortlist.  Eaton’s achieved this apparent breadth of taste by playing the law of averages.  By recommending a whopping 46 shows, he guarantees that he and his paper will appear both foresighted (all 13 shows on the shortlist appear on Eaton’s list, practically assuring that he’s backed at least a couple of winners) and appreciative of a wide range of styles (his list can’t fail to contain shows no other paper has included on their own, much shorter, lists).

In fact, by hedging his bets this way, all Eaton has ensured is that this year’s other list-makers appear to have more confidence in their own judgement than he does.

To be continued…

In my next post, I’ll explain why pre-Festival list-making is a fruitless exercise in journalistic masturbation (conveniently excusing myself from having not written one).

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18 July, 2009

The Container

Young Vic, 15 – 30 July 2009

Reviewed for the British Theatre Guide

If you manage to get a ticket for Clare Bayley’s The Container – and with a capacity of just 28 per performance, that’ll make you part of a fairly exclusive group – first check the weather forecast, and pray for rain.

Staged in a freight container parked outside the Young Vic, The Container simulates the experience of illegal immigration aboard a long-haul lorry. Inside it’s pitch dark and smells slightly musty (avoid this production if you’re claustrophobic or afraid of the dark).

The whole space rumbles and vibrates to create a convincing illusion of movement, the result of designer Naomi Dawson and sound designer Adrienne Quartly’s combined technical efforts. That vibration creeps into your body, through the floor and the uncomfortable wooden crates that serve as seats, and sets your guts squirming.

Compound the rumbling and mustiness and darkness with heavy rain, rattling relentlessly on the container’s roof and sides, and the word ‘tense’ begins to sound woefully inadequate. The sound of rain makes the space feel even smaller, and requires the cast to raise their voices, which has a much greater effect in a metal box than it would have on stage.

It’s also a constant reminder of how hostile the outside world is to the characters, all of whom are braving unscrupulous traffickers and European police to escape war, oppression and refugee camps. The door is locked from the outside, forcing the characters – and the audience – to trust sporadic reports from a threatening Agent (Chris Spyrides) concerned more with putting one over on the authorities than with their wellbeing.

The Container is deserving of its Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award simply for its lateral-thinking approach to altering British perceptions of asylum seekers. Rather than try to release immigrants from their pigeonhole, the play puts the British public right in there with them.

Written by Clare Bayley

Crew includes Tom Wright (director), Naomi Dawson (designer) and Adrienne Quartly (sound designer)

Cast includes Amber Agar (Mariam), Doreene Blackstock (Fatima), Abhin Galeya (Jemal), Hassani Shapi (Ahmed) and Chris Spyrides (Agent)

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13 July, 2009

The Ultimate Critics’ Pick of the Fringe 2009 – part 1

Written for The Collective Review, 13 July 2009

The 2009 Edinburgh Festival Fringe Official Programme has been available for about a month now.  All the influential voices in theatre criticism have had plenty of time to comb through it and produce lists of recommendations.  By analysing all these lists together, I’ve discovered this year’s Ultimate Critics’ Pick of the Fringe.

The Times, the Guardian, the London Evening Standard, the Scotsman and The List (the Scottish equivalent of Time Out) have all published lists of varying lengths.  I couldn’t find lists from the Independent, the Telegraph, the Financial Times or the Mail; if you know of any that are available online, please post a link in the comments!

The Numbers Game

If you strip down the lists to only include shows that belong in the Theatre section of the programme, then the Times nominates 11 shows, the Guardian five, the Evening Standard five, the Scotsman 46 and The List six.  If you cross-reference the stripped-down lists and look only at shows nominated by more than one publication, you get a shortlist of the 13 most hyped shows in the run-up to 2009’s Fringe.

Nine of the 13 get two nominations.  Three get three.  Just one production in the entire Theatre section of this year’s programme gets the nod from four out of five lists.  Not one comes recommended by all five.

Six of the Times’s 11 picks make it into the shortlist, along with three of the Guardian’s five, 13 of the Scotsman’s 46 and four of The List’s six.  All five of the Evening Standard’s recommendations are in the shortlist, which means the Standard’s Fiona Mountford hasn’t picked a single show not also nominated by at least one other paper.

The Shortlist

Shows nominated twice
Barflies
Beachy Head
A British Subject
The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church
Morecambe
Palace of the End
Sea Wall
Suckerville
The World’s Wife

Shows nominated thrice
Blondes
Orphans
The World is Too Much: Theatre for Breakfast

And with four nominations, the Ultimate Critics’ Pick of the Fringe – the number one most hyped show of 2009 – is:
The Girls of Slender Means

To be continued…

In my next post, I’ll reveal what these figures say about this year’s Fringe, and about the list-makers themselves.

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17 June, 2009

The Mountaintop

Theatre 503, 9 June – 4 July 2009

Reviewed for the London Theatre Blog

In this imagining of Martin Luther King Jr’s last night alive, award-winning young American playwright Katori Hall boldly combines hard historical fact and in-depth character study with a comparatively barmy supernatural twist. It’s a volatile concoction that could corrode the credibility of a lesser play, but which instead provides an already dynamic production with a surging second-stage boost.

The man in the King’s shoes is David Harewood, who seems to be aiming for a career playing inspirational black leaders (he’ll soon appear on TV as Nelson Mandela). Harewood convincingly recreates the booms, swoops and tremulous vibrato of King’s legendary oratory, maintaining the vocal cadence of a preacher even alone in the privacy of his motel room. He evokes a man consumed continually by a struggle he ironically believes he alone can carry to conclusion.

He’s matched and challenged by Lorraine Burroughs as motel maid Camae, who surprises King with her views – rooted in the same beliefs as his own, but a step removed in their conclusions – and by proving no mean orator herself. Her presence brings out King’s roving eye and patriarchal views to contrast his civil rights work, which makes for much more interesting theatre than a blindly reverent onstage beatification.

Camae is also the crux of that sudden supernatural gear-change, which, far from derailing the play, not only provides some unexpectedly surreal and comic moments (mostly involving one-sided telephone conversations) but also allows us to experience anew through King’s eyes events he didn’t live to see. Thus The Mountaintop is upgraded from period character study to a history with an immediate bearing on the modern world, drawing causal links between the life and death of King and the appointment of Barack Obama to the White House.

Written by Katori Hall

Crew includes James Dacre (director), Libby Watson (designer), Emma Chapman (lighting designer), Richard Hammarton (sound designer) and Dick Straker of Mesmer (video designer)

Cast includes Lorraine Burroughs (Camae) and David Harewood (King)

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31 May, 2009

All’s Well That End Well

National Theatre, 28 May – 30 September 2009

Reviewed for the London Theatre Blog

All’s Well That Ends Well is supposedly one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, though you wouldn’t guess that from Marianne Elliott’s production at the National (the third of this year’s Travelex £10 ticket plays).

Apparently, the play’s usual flaw is Bertram, the male romantic lead. When the King of France forcibly weds him to Helena, in return for her curing him of a fistula, Bertram’s reaction is one of extreme distaste. He proceeds to abhor his wife for the rest of the play, joining the army to avoid her and promising to consummate his vows only if she fulfils certain nigh-impossible conditions. Then, when she duly fulfils those conditions, he turns on a sixpence in the interests of a happy ending.

Here, Bertram (George Rainsford) is a snooty child of privilege whose rejection of Helena is a reactionary response to their class difference, and his sudden turnaround is the logical result of his confidant Parolles’ exposure as a coward and fraudster, which shows Bertram that his judgement of character isn’t as sound as he thinks it is. It’s then perfectly natural for him, upon his reunion with the wife he thought dead of heartbreak, to be grateful for a second chance with a woman whose praises are sung by every other character, but whom he foolishly dismissed without a second look.

More importantly, Bertram’s change of heart is a victory for Helena, who takes the traditionally male role of dogged suitor and stubbornly refuses to take “no” for an answer. Michelle Terry, who deftly handled multiple roles in season opener England People Very Nice, here deftly embodies Helena’s strongest aspects – her determination and her good-humoured mischievous streak. Perhaps fittingly, her performance is weakest when showing Helena’s weakness; the monologues mourning her unrequited love are drastically overplayed.

The only ‘problem’ aspect remaining is what Terry’s independent Helena sees in Rainsford’s spoiled Bertram in the first place.

None of which is to say that this is a flawless production. The stylised silent vignettes Elliott uses to cover scene changes seem pasted in, at odds with the dark gravity of Rae Smith’s imposing, tumbledown set; and Helena’s ‘resurrection’ is greeted with saccharine streams of golden light and a rain of sparkly rose petals. All that’s missing is a choir of angels.

Perhaps under other circumstances having ’solved’ All’s Well would be enough of an achievement, but this is the National we’re talking about; it’s perfectly justifiable to demand more.

Written by William Shakespeare

Crew includes Marianne Elliott (director) and Rae Smith (designer)

Cast includes Oliver Ford Davies (King of France), Clare Higgins (The Countess of Rossillion), Conleth Hill (Parolles), George Rainsford (Bertram) and Michelle Terry (Helena)

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8 May, 2009

The Contingency Plan

Bush Theatre, 22 April – 6 June 2009

Reviewed for the London Theatre Blog

If anthropogenic climate change is the greatest challenge currently facing mankind, then right now Steve Waters’ The Contingency Plan at the Bush Theatre is the most important artwork in the country.

Either individually or combined, On the Beach and Resilience – the independent but complementary constituent plays of Waters’ double bill – trumpet an uncompromising challenge to conventional, optimistic projections regarding the results of our effect on the climate.

In On the Beach, glaciologist Will Paxton (Geoffrey Streatfeild) returns home to Norfolk after an extended stint in Antarctica, to present his new girlfriend Sarika (Stephanie Street) to his parents, and to confront his reclusive father Robin (Robin Soans), who gave up glaciology two decades ago to observe sea birds on the salt marshes.

In Resilience, Sarika likewise presents Will to the Ministry for Climate Change, where he faces off against Colin (also Robin Soans), the colleague that discredited his father, in an attempt to convince the new Conservative government to legislate according to his own radically pessimistic predictions of coastal flooding in Britain.

If you can see both (highly recommended), see On the Beach first. If you can’t, see Resilience: though its focus is squarely on the policy makers and not those affected first hand by the crisis, it contains not only the best laughs (mostly courtesy of David Bark-Jones’ dangerously clueless Minister), but also the most important science.

Will’s solution is that there is no solution; there’s nothing left to do but retreat inland and abandon the coast to the North Sea. Before Resilience’s interval he reels off a list of draconian-sounding measures, including compulsory purchase and demolition of non-carbon neutral homes. Waters and his agent are adamant that the science used in the play is sound and rigorously up to date.

Downers don’t come much bigger, but neither play ever ceases to entertain, even when Soans’ characters show their similarities by breaking out the visual aids. Hard science and the accompanying pessimism are counterbalanced by dramatic flair in both the text and the performances. While the big issue naturally and rightly dominates, Will’s relationship with his father gets nearly as much exposure; and Street, along with Susan Brown as both Will’s mother and Tessa, Minister for Resilience, fly the flag for women finding footholds in predominantly male arenas. Soans’ portrayal of two similar but distinct obsessives, one comical, one eventually somewhat sinister, particularly stands out.

The only ray of hope in Waters’ predicted stormfront is that both plays are set a few years in the future. If the science is as solid as he claims, we can only hope the policy makers don’t greet him as Chris greets Will – at first jovially, then later bitterly, as “Nostradamus”.

Written by Steve Waters

Crew includes Tamara Harvey (director, Resilience), Michael Longhurst (director, On the Beach), Tom Scutt (designer), Oliver Fenwick (lighting designer) and Emma Laxton (sound designer)

Cast includes David Bark-Jones (Chris), Susan Brown (Jenny in On the Beach/Tessa in Resilience), Robin Soans (Robin in On the Beach/Colin in Resilience), Geoffrey Streatfeild (Will) and Stephanie Street (Sarika)

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6 March, 2009

The New Electric Ballroom

Riverside Studios, 3 – 29 March 2009

Reviewed for the British Theatre Guide

The women of Enda Walsh’s The New Electric Ballroom are like Chekhov’s Three Sisters without a Moscow to dream of. The only worthwhile pastime in their stagnant Irish harbour town is reliving the past – which only perpetuates the cycle of stagnation.

Now, I got tired of plays about the futile repetitiveness of life when Chekhov was still writing them, eighty or ninety years before I was born. But Walsh manages somehow to present an uncompromisingly bleak worldview without making his audience want to die, and that’s a praiseworthy feat.

The women (two of them, Breda and Clara, are sisters; the third, Ada, could be a daughter, younger sister or houseguest) live in an inhospitable fish-house designed by Sabina Dargeant. The aluminium door rumbles and clangs, the floor is stone with a moss-infested gutter, and even inside it’s misty with cold.

They are creatures of repetition and routine. Ada encourages and directs as the old sisters endlessly play-act the loss of their innocence, years ago at the New Electric Ballroom. Through ritual repetition, the sisters worry at the perceived root of their miserable lives, and impress upon Ada the woe that awaits should she venture outside the chilly house in search of love.

In so many similarly-themed plays, the cycle of suffering rolls over the audience like a steamroller and slowly crushes out their will to live. But The New Electric Ballroom is funny, and filthy, and above all, fast-paced.

Walsh’s script is so rich with glorious imagery, smut and invective that most of it has to be delivered with the speed and chatter of an express train. Colourful characters, surreal situations and casually damning comments on the personal hygiene or physical deformities of the townsfolk all zip past the window with barely a pause for breath.

Domestic discussions balance the breakneck pace of the monologues. Bookended by pregnant pauses and delivered with tremendous gravity, the most banal utterances (“May I have some tea to wash this biscuit down?”) take on a ponderous portentousness.

This is not a piece of Naturalism. People do not talk this way in real life. But this is a play about stories, labels, talk; in a word, words, and Walsh’s heightened, poetic writing calls attention to them.

People don’t act this way, either. What little action is permitted to distract attention from the dialogue is so loaded with symbolism the women seem cowed under its weight.

The best moment comes when they finally upgrade fishmonger Patrick from regular but necessary intruder to welcome houseguest. Before he can say “milk, no sugar,” he’s stripped, hosed down and scrubbed pink to clean off all the labels (“lumpen, ugly, fishy”) attached to him by the townsfolk.

When it comes to Ada – desperate to escape but limited in her experiences to second-hand heartbreak inherited from her companions – Walsh’s direction is more ambiguous, or perhaps confusing. She’s stiff, round-shouldered, often gazing or clutching ineffectually toward the middle distance.

It could be representative of her sheltered existence, but the effect often veers uncomfortably close to declamatory melodrama.

Not one of the characters will ever escape the shadow of the New Electric Ballroom; they’re all doomed to repeat their greatest regrets for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, we can all have tremendous fun laughing along and feeling unutterably glad we aren’t them.

Written by Enda Walsh

Crew includes Enda Walsh (director) and Sabine Dargeant (design)

Cast includes Rosaleen Linehan, Ruth McCabe, Mikel Murfi and Catherine Walsh

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12 February, 2009

England People Very Nice

National Theatre, 4 February – 30 April 2009

Reviewed for the London Theatre Blog

The National Theatre is billing England People Very Nice, the first show of 2009 to offer Travelex £10 tickets, as playwright Richard Bean’s state-of-the-nation play. Well, according to Bean, the state of the nation is the same as always: reactionary and xenophobic.

Covering four waves of immigration – French Huguenots, Irish, Jews and Bangladeshis – Bean points a flashing neon finger the size of the Olivier Theatre at our national tendency towards intolerance.

The play does a great job putting the problems of today’s multicultural London in perspective, as each generation of immigrants eventually integrates into British life and then takes its turn oppressing the next. It’s enough to make anyone wonder why we’re still considered a go-to nation for anyone fleeing persecution and adversity.

Yet Bean somehow houses this damning admonishment in an epic, centuries-spanning romantic comedy, throughout which the successive reincarnations of a pair of lovers try again and again to love one another despite cultural divides and running gags. And as if that plot weren’t enough, it is itself embedded in a fairly iffy piece of metatheatre.

The immigrants in the detention centre in 2009, you see, have devised the centuries-spanning romantic comedy while waiting on their applications for leave to remain. At its best, this framing device salts the open wound of British hypocrisy: citizenship exams, testing the loyalty of potential immigrants to the nation that banged them up as soon as they arrived? Such exquisite irony. So quintessentially British.

But the cynic in me can’t help seeing the play-within-a-play as a Get Out Of Jail Free card Bean dealt to himself under the table, allowing him to neatly sidestep criticism with the excuse, “that’s how the characters would have devised it.” And at its worst, the device is a megaphone through which Bean can announce (in case we’re a little slow on the uptake) that it doesn’t matter if a character lives through the Blitz and still looks twenty-five in 2009, because that’s the magic of theatre.

The comedy does work. It tempers the worthier observations and keeps the play from turning into art as social work for the nation. So does the star-cross’d romance. After all, the truest measure of a country’s receptiveness to new cultures is the rate of intermarriage. But I don’t need Olivia Colman’s immigration officer Philippa to face front and tell me so before I can appreciate the point.

Bean could do with worrying a little less about whether people will pick up on his meaning. It’s clear enough without all the highlighting, and in overclarifying himself, he runs the risk of closing down alternative interpretations, yanking the subtext into the foreground and robbing the play of depth.

Written by Richard Bean

Crew includes Nicholas Hytner (director), Mark Thompson (designer), Pete Bishop (director of animation), Neil Austin (lighting designer), Grant Olding (music) and Scarlett Mackmin (choreographer)

Cast includes Olivia Colman (Philippa/Anne O’Neill/Camilla), Sacha Dhawan (Norfolk Danny/Carlo/Aaron/Mushi), Trevor Laird (Yayah/Rennie), Aaron Neil (Iqbal/De Gascoigne/John O’Neill/Chief Rabbi/Attar/Imam), Sophie Stanton (Sanya/Ida) and Michelle Terry (Camille/Mary/Black Ruth/Deborah)

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28 January, 2009

Why I Don’t Hate White People

Lyric Hammersmith, 22 January – 14 February 2009

Reviewed for the British Theatre Guide

Lemn Sissay’s Why I Don’t Hate White People, at the Lyric Hammersmith, should be compulsory viewing for white Britons that don’t think they’re racist.

For anyone that considers colourblindness a positive attitude towards race, or claims that they “don’t even see” skin colour, this show could be an uncomfortable but necessary wake-up call. Colourblindness, as Sissay points out, is an illness.

Sissay – creator, writer, sole performer and subject matter of this autobiographical show – has a unique perspective on white British attitudes to race. Raised in Lancashire by the care system, he didn’t meet another black person until he was 18 years old.

This experience – of being raised as “one of them” – allows him to pick feverishly at the truth underlying Britain’s vaunted multicultural society, and unravel the mystery behind why, when life keeps handing him excuses, he still doesn’t hate white people.

For a career performance poet and veteran of his previous autobiographical one-man show Something Dark, which toured the world for three years, Sissay is an unusually nervous performer.

The show’s format is choppy, requiring him to hop from narration to anecdote to persona as instantaneously as the abrupt lighting and sound cues. The pace seems to leave him physically breathless, and causes him more than once to trip over his words.

Director John E McGrath seems to think the text lacks theatricality, and has provided Sissay with a mime for nearly every phrase. One minute he’s rowing upstream towards the truth; the next he’s teetering on the edge of childhood, ready to dive into adolescence.

To be fair, Sissay’s writing is liberally laced with poetic metaphor, but physically enacting each one encourages overly literal surface readings. Besides, Sissay seems the most relaxed and confident when narrating as himself in his own voice. The show is only fifty minutes long; his presence and his words are engaging enough to hold our attention at least that long.

In fact, at the risk of doing Sissay down, his message comes across most strongly when he’s reduced to the role of projection screen.

His focus is on well-meaning, “invisible” racism: when people make a point of sitting by him on the bus to prove they aren’t racist, or claim to be colourblind only when confronted by colour, or tell him he isn’t a black man – he’s a human being.

To this end he’s filmed a selection of white Britons responding to his query, “What does ‘white’ mean to you?” Primed by the aforementioned anecdotes, we don’t have to strain very hard to hear the interviewees’ subconscious minds screaming, “Don’t mention race! Say anything but race!” The result is a series of varyingly eloquent but uniformly evasive meditations on blizzards, laundry, Snow White, weddings, cleanliness and everything other connotation of ‘white’ bar race.

It’s only thanks to Sissay sharing his personal experiences that we’re able to identify the ingrained prejudice these responses reveal. However benevolent he may feel about white people, you may well leave the auditorium with your own opinion altered.

Written by Lemn Sissay

Crew includes John E McGrath (director), Rachana Jadhav (designer), Nigel Edwards (lighting designer), Simon McCorry (sound designer) and Clive Hunte (videomaker)

Cast includes Lemn Sissay

Need a second opinion?

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