by Laura Kressly
Immensely intelligent Jerome has always struggled to find his place in the world. He was too poor to go to private school like his best friend Henry, but at secondary school he got bullied for sounding white and talking posh. This coming-of-age monologue navigates growing up when you don’t quite fit in on the estate in Harlesden, at the shop where you work, or at the competitive uni out of town.
Continue reading
by Laura Kressly
Lula Mebrahtu inhabits multiple worlds: the UK, Eritrea, the present and her ancestors’ past. To construct this show she draws on traditional dance, contemporary British club culture, and Afro-futurism to create a unique dramaturgy that seeks to capture the experience of living across multiple cultures.
Continue reading
by Laura Kressly
The Spanish arrived in the Philippines in 1521. This was the start of centuries of violent colonial rule that still resonates today. Max Percy, a gay, mixed race Filipino man, carries this legacy in his body. It seems that no matter what he does, from visiting his Filipino grandfather, to flirting and fucking his way through London’s gay clubs, he is fetishised and othered. Percy’s complex solo show samples the racism and homophobia he encounters, shares Filipino creation stories, and uses movement to capture the tension between the different cultures he inhabits.
Continue reading
by Laura Kressly
In 1992, Nasa’s shuttle launch Endeavour STS-47 had two firsts in its crew: an African American woman, and a married couple. Though the first is a major achievement in terms of racial equality and representation, the media was far more interested in whether or not the married couple had sex in space. A cast of five women use this remarkable, real-life history to consider racism and misogyny at NASA and more widely in this highly visual show.
Continue reading
by Laura Kressly
Section 28, the British law that prohibited the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities, was passed in 1998 by Margaret Thatcher’s government. Though repealed in 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in England and Wales, Ellice Stevens (she/her) & Billy Barrett’s (he/him) verbatim musical demonstrates the harm this legislation caused on millions of queer people, and serves as a warning against today’s rampant transphobia.
Continue reading
by Diana Miranda
The London-based theatre company that goes by the fitting name Ensemble Not Found is a group of East Asian artists that bend storytelling boundaries and explore unconventional ways to connect with audiences. The company first caught my eye at VAULT Festival 2023 with their debut show Project Atom Boi. The piece is a multi-media insight on existential dread through the perspective of a self-indulgent filmmaker attempting to capture the memories of a young Londoner who grew up in a Chinese nuclear town. It involves audiences through live video and drawing boards, inviting volunteers to doodle words that trigger the protagonist’s memories.
Continue reading
By Luisa De la Concha Montes
My Uncle is Not Pablo Escobar is a dynamic and exuberant play that explores and celebrates what it means to be a Latinx in London. It is a detective story peppered with telenovela-style drama.
Continue reading
by Laura Kressly
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is one of this country’s great classical composers and conductors. His cantata trilogy The Song of Hiawatha is considered the best adaptation of Longfellow’s epic poem, and he had a celebrated career in the UK and abroad. Despite this, he died in 1912 at the age of 37, exhausted and in poverty. This was the end result of a lifetime spent resisting white supremacy that oppressed him for his Blackness.
Continue reading
by Luisa De la Concha Montes
Mustafa Algiyadi’s stand-up comedy show is a breath of fresh air. He knows better than to try to convince his audience that the stereotypes they hold about Arabs are wrong. So instead, he does the unexpected, turning the show around, making his listeners the victims of his jokes.
Continue reading
by Euan Vincent
Unseen Unheard, a show seeking to improve the representation of Black women with breast cancer, is a co-production between Black Women Rising and Peckham Theatre. The production emerged from the real stories of black women’s struggles after a cancer diagnosis and the myriad problems that the system affords them, based on their race. From the belief that black women don’t feel pain – “they see us as superhuman and subhuman at the same time” – to the absence of prosthetics of an appropriate skin tone, point to health inequities that the statistics sadly bear out. Black women are 28% more likely to die from a triple-negative breast cancer diagnosis than white women with the same diagnosis.
Continue reading
The Play's The Thing UK 