by guest critic Maeve Campbell
Shon Dale-Jones and Hoipolloi’s Me and Robin Hood has admirable intentions in aiming to raise awareness and money for charity ‘Street Child’. Dale-Jones’ one-man show is a personal narrative, part biography and part discussion on class and wealth divisions in Britain. The mythical medieval do-gooder is a central figure in the piece, an inspiration and obsession for the socially conflicted Dale-Jones.
How do I, a white woman from the world’s wealthiest country, voluntarily living in the world’s fifth wealthiest country, who is educated and working in the arts, evaluate a show about a black British woman’s experience of travelling slave trade routes?
A British Pakistani Muslim tries to reconcile his faith and family with his love of men and clubbing.
A gay guy and his straight female bff share a flat, a mutual adoration for classic films and the occasional man.
Liver & Lung Productions’ two new plays, whilst needing further development, look at two issues that queer men of colour face. Submission is the stronger of the two works, though Sarah, Sky and Seven Other Guys includes a mix of serious and light-hearted material.
by an anonymous guest critic
To honour the 50th anniversary of his death, this is the first time we get to see Orton’s original version of the script before the Lord Chamberlain censored it prior to the 1966 production.
Marnie’s a 22-year-old single mum from Bermondsey and every day is a fight at the moment. Her mum’s harbouring Marnie’s abusive ex, the guy she’s in love with has a new bird who’s using the legal system to keep them apart and her daughter’s dad isn’t around. Marnie currently lives in a woman’s refuge and the shadow of social services is hanging over her.
Actor and writer Milly Thomas is an unstoppable force refusing to shy away from tough material. A First World Problem, her most recent play, lays bare the cruel adolescent world of a top girls’ private school. Her two shows at the fringe are stylistically different from each other, but both are similarly confrontational. Brutal Cessation forces the audience to examine the gender stereotypes within an abusive, cishet relationship and Dust, the significantly stronger of the two works, is a monologue on mental health and suicide.
A woman falls asleep in front of the telly waiting for her teenaged son to come home. Instead, the police knocking on her door wake her up at 3 am. Her son’s fine, but he’s done something so horrendous she refuses disclose it.
Mowgli, a ferocious boy-child raised by wolves in the jungle, has been kicked out of the pack. He’s trying to figure out what to do next when he meets a mysterious creature from another world – or rather, another story. Puck has been watching Mowgli with unusually keen interest, so the two might be able to help each other out.
In Duluth, Minnesota, ships, trains and buses come and go under a sweeping midwestern sky heavy with snow. It’s 1934, the height of the Great Depression. A desperate, drifting populace chase the shadows of their debtors and rumours of work in and out of the port city.
A middle-aged, gay Welshman contemplates the English class he teaches in Hong Kong. Amongst the students is Windy, the Chinese woman with whom he shares his bed. Utterly smitten with her, he refers to her as his Pocahontas. He then kisses a barbie doll with long black hair and tanned skin.
Pocahontas was a Native American woman kidnapped by the colonising English in the 1600s, forced to marry, then taken to Britain. The same woman bore her husband a child then died, aged 21, after contracting a European illness.
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