Johannes, a young man with pronounced learning difficulties, is in solitary confinement for raping and murdering a young girl. The prison captain Agnes, seeing goodness in the boy, introduces him to Christianity and gains permission for him to live and work on a remote island farm. Sadly, her good intentions don’t come to fruition in this story that disintegrates as quickly as its moral compass does. A strong cast of four help ease the discomfort that abuse and structural weakness encourages, though good performances aren’t enough to redeem The Awakening.

Unn (Joana Nastari) lives alone on the farm she runs whilst her brother is at sea fishing most of the year. Keen to have help, she seeks out Agnes for help finding a suitable farmhand. Nastari is the highlight of the show as she delicately guides Unn’s transformation from cold dictator to accommodating teacher; it’s a marvellous transformation despite the character’s questionable ethics. Alex Dowding’s Johannes is charming and innocent, with the added depth of a violent edge that could emerge at any moment. 

Despite the performances, Julian Garner’s script is the problem here. The plot becomes more and more choppy as it goes on, as if Garner cut entire scenes in the last third in order to meet a running time restriction, leaving the whole thing to collapse at sea. The ending offers no resolution or explanation for Unn’s choices, and supporting character Iversen is underwritten and implausible. An interval serves to fragment the story even further and the initial work on relationships to disappear.

The minimalist set by Florence Watts is versatile and indicative of the Scandinavian setting, complimented by Jennifer Rose’s sleek lighting. Director Medelaine Moore captures the rhythm of the scenes well, though she makes some questionable staging choices in the routes through and around the space – they become comical rather than indicative of a location change.

The Awakening feels like the work of an inexperienced playwright, though the production does a fairly good job at realising the characters and ideas that are lightly sketched in the script. It has the potential to be a challenging story; instead it drifts away into nothingness.

The Awakening runs through 24 September.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.

I can’t imagine living in a country where theatre is censored for criticising the government, and theatre makers who create politically subversive work risk arrest, torture and death. But this is the reality of Belarus Free Theatre. Its three founders, now refugees living and working in London, risk imprisonment if they return to their home country. They stubbornly continue to make work that’s ferociously critical of the Belarusian and Russian governments, and aggressively eye-opening for audiences like us who do not live under an oppressive dictatorship. 

Unadulterated rage and brutal experiences at the hands of the Belarusian and Russian judicial systems underpins Burning Doors, a nearly two-hour long collage of striking visual theatre. BFT tries to do too much here though, and it’s totally overwhelming. Though the show will undoubtedly linger for some time, a narrower selection of content and narratives explored more in-depth would have more personal impact.

Featuring Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina and her experiences in prison, the piece has a focus on the true stories of activists at the hands of the government. Dostoyevsky and Foucault also inform the piece, though there is the sense that there is much more at play than three individuals’ stories. There is a disconnect between the experiences shown, making them feel like isolated incidents rather than a sample of widespread persecution. Some wider context is provided, but there is little sense of the world these activists live in. It feels like it would be helpful to have more knowledge of Russian and Belarusian politics, and not having this knowledge is somewhat alienating.

That’s not to say that the show isn’t powerful. The company’s fearlessness in using extreme physical performance to show the brutality of the regimes is admirable and courageous. The final half hour or so is an extended movement sequence using acrobatics, rope work and combat utterly  horrifies – there is no doubt that the depicted of torture and abuse has happened and continues to do so in prisons all over Russia and Belarus. This section is by far the strongest. 

The ensemble cast of seven work together seamlessly and have a fantastically watchable rapport. Their unwavering commitment and passion makes for compelling viewing. Their precision is enhanced through Joshua Pharo, Nicolai Khalezin and Richard Hammarton’s design. 

Though Burning Doors huge ambition and absence of a through line ultimately do the show a disservice, it’s bold portrayal of government sanctioned torture against its own people is radical, challenging and necessary.

Burning Doors runs through 24 September, then tours nationally and internationally through 3 December.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.

Focus E15 Hostel in east London isn’t the lap of luxury. Far from it – it’s the last resort of dozens of people who would otherwise end up on the streets. The dedicated mother and baby unit is a particular refuge for young women and their babies with no where else to go. That is, until the council serves them an eviction notice so they can sell the land to property developers. Promises of rehousing have been undermined by stories of families being moved outside of the borough, sometimes hours outside of London and away from everything they know. Angered by the unfeeling power government officials wield over their lives, the mothers from Focus E15 organise and launch an attack on those that favour profit over people. Their campaign is captured in verbatim play E15, a piece that is part political rally and part documentary.

One of the drawbacks to verbatim performance is that material is usually sourced in one-to-one interviews, so dialogue between characters is either limited or artificially constructed. Though this is evident here, placing much of the action within a protest or occupation keeps energy up, and monologuing makes more sense in this context. It would be great to see more in-depth character interaction though, particularly between the mothers, in order to develop a greater sense of the community their work hinges on.

The cast’s confidence and conviction are infectious, and the DIY-style set design lends a further sense of grassroots unity. The party that’s going on when the audience enters sets an upbeat, relaxed tone that soon shifts to the tenants’ grim reality – an excellent contrast.

Fortunately, the Focus E15 residents have some effect, but their campaign must on – what happened to them is happening to others. E15 successfully brings the audience to their side and encourages awareness and campaigning, but the verbatim text lacks the anger that is kept in check in the interview process. This is a story that would have more emotional immediacy with a script informed by their testimony rather than constructed from it. The production certainly has plenty of merit and is well performed by the ensemble cast but in this instance, the verbatim script serves to distance rather than bring these people fully to life.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.

For better or worse so much of our life, personality and choices are shaped by relationships with family. A stable, loving upbringing can equip an individual with the same traits, and the opposite often ushers in a lifetime of hardship. House + Amongst the Reeds are two short plays presented as a double bill by Clean Break showing the consequences of family disruption on the lives of young people. Different in content and tone, both have their faults in their execution but lay bare a selection of issues in Western social and familial fabrics.

Oni and Gillian are two undocumented, homeless teenagers in Chino Odimba’s Amongst the Reeds. The two girls are the same age, and both ran away from abusive family members who their parents trusted to raise and educate in the UK. Nigerian Oni and Vietnamese Gillian are chalk and cheese, but when Oni promises of a house of their own where they can raise Gillian’s soon-to-be-born baby, education and good jobs once she receives her leave to remain, Gillian can’t resist. Tragically, youthful optimism and ignorance leads them to a very different place. 

An ambiguous ending leads to questions of what is and isn’t real, but the story is a powerful reminder that there are young people in similar situations hiding in plain sight up and down the country. They don’t need to be deported, they need to be placed with a caring family who can help them achieve the education and quality of life they deserve. 

The characterisation of both girls tends to generalise, but actors Rebecca Omogbehin and Jan Le endow them with heart. There are too many stereotypes present that blockpotential pathos, but the story is a strong one that needs to be refined and heard. 

House is structurally more developed with well-rounded characters, though there is a pronounced lack of background information that is alluded to in this mini kitchen sink drama. Mama is seeing her estranged, eldest daughter for the first time in years, and her younger daughter, the good devoted one, has a secret she needs to share. 

Writer Somalia Seaton tries to fit an overly tangled web into too short of a time for her characters to properly confront their issues, but the cast of three deliver some lovely performances. Shvorne Marks and Rebecca Omogbehin as sisters Patricia and Jemima have a fantastic chemistry, combining to amusingly wind up their traditional, Nigerian mum. There’s enough humour to lighten the complexity of the character’s volatile relationships, though the story is incomplete and patchy.

Though House is the more sophisticated piece, the execution of Amongst the Reeds is marginally better. The latter is simpler and with issues that leave more lasting impact, though the former has more scope for development into a stunning piece of contemporary naturalism.

Even though there are problems with both short plays, this double bill gives voice to sorely underrepresented demographics. Clean Break’s work is an absolutely vital contribution to the UK theatre landscape, and more companies need to follow suit.

House + Amongst the Reeds runs through 17 September.

The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.