Can violent criminals be rehabilitated, and can their victims ever forgive them? The Listening Room says yes.
This verbatim piece tells the stories of three violent crimes, primarily from the perspective of the perpetrators. Some character background sets the scene for climactic moments where they commit their offences, but at least half of each of the five characters’ stories spotlights the rehabilitation process and mediation between the assailants and their victims.
by guest critic Maeve Ryan
In her small Wiltshire village, Jaz says she’s ‘as black as it goes’. This is a beautifully made one woman show in which Natasha Marshall plays all the characters, but chiefly Jaz, a 17-year-young woman of mixed African and British parentage. Half Breed concerns self-identity and how self-acceptance can be the root to accepting others. It also concerns the deep intensity of young female friendship, for it is also a love story between Jaz and her best friend Brogan.
by guest critic Liam Rees
Alex Gwyther’s Eyes Closed, Ears Covered is a slippery play that continuously raises questions. We’re immediately presented with Alyson Cummins’ concrete-grey, angular set, suggestive of a brutalist play park in a rundown housing estate. A recording of a distressed phone call to the police about a pair of young boys and a terrible act of violence adds tension. Gwyther’s script immediately has us hooked with the right amount of specific details to suggest what may have occurred whilst not to revealing too much.
Eggs Collective are after the #bestnighteva with this joyful show modelled on the great British night out. Gold sequinned dresses, blue eyeshadow, and WKD by the bucketload are vital ingredients of this playful tribute to one of this country’s most venerated institutions.
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.
by guest critic Simona Negretto
In 1997 Edna Walsh’s Disco Pigs hit the world with the story of an intoxicating and obsessive friendship between two teenagers, Runt and Pig, and their crazy, oneiric, visionary night out. Today, to celebrate its 20th anniversary, Tara Finney reprises the play in a vivid production permeated by the bittersweet taste of nostalgia.
There’s a database where you can look up the size of reparations paid to slave owners after slavery was abolished. In Dominoes, History teacher Leila and her fiancé Andy share the same last name – McKinnon. Andy’s white and Scottish, Leila’s half black-Caribbean. When curiosity gets the better of her in the run up to their half term wedding, she makes a discovery that pits family and friends against each other and threatens to destroy her big day.
Humayun and Babur have known each other since they were boys. Now the newest of emperor Shah Jahan’s imperial guards in Agra, the best friends work side-by-side on the night shift. Today is different, though. The first light of dawn will reveal the completed Taj Mahal, previously hidden from anyone other than its makers. Fit to burst with excitement, the two don’t know that the day to come will irrevocably change them as they fall prey to the giant cogs of the imperial machine.
Tucked between the hipster heaven that is the Bussey Building and south London armpit Peckham bus depot, Basic Space Festival has taken up a brief residency at Safehouse 1, one of a collection of formerly derelict properties managed by Maverick Projects. Sophie Andrea Mitchell’s DRINKS, one of the site-responsive festival productions, is a sitcom-ish, millennial comedy on reconciling friendship with growing up.
Rob and Paul are best mates, albeit total polar opposites. They share a cozy bachelor pad where they engage in typical mid-20s, male behaviour – drinking, weight lifting, discussing women in graphic detail and fighting off zombies. Well into the zombie apocalypse, the lads lucked out – solar panels and generators keep them in heat and electricity, and they secured their block of flats so the undead can’t get in. But when a masked intruder turns up, their groove is properly disrupted. Dark comedy Living A Little is a post-apocalyptic genre mashup that’s polished and unexpectedly poignant.
The Play's The Thing UK 