Black Men Walking: theatre review

Black Men Walking is an Eclipse Theatre Company production directed by Dawn Walton and written by composer, rapper and writer Testament. It is an original, exciting and enlightening piece of theatre, which aims to resurface 500 years of forgotten Black-British history while uncovering the ever-present racism of contemporary Britain. Continue reading

Same Same Different: a sense of belonging for the trans-racial adoptee

Writer Naomi Sumner Chan’s new verbatim play Same Same Different diverts from the widely-told adoption fairy tale that follows parents through the process of trying to adopt, where adoption as the happy endgame. Here she examines what happens after the happy ending, the “tainted golden ticket”; how adoptive families sculpt themselves and their unit, and what residual questions remain for – particularly trans-racial – adoptees. Continue reading

Noughts & Crosses: racism revisited

Malorie Blackman’s widely taught and celebrated is brought to the stage by a plethora of theatre companies; York Theatre Royal, Pilot Theatre, Belgrade Theatre Coventry, Derby Theatre and Mercury Theatre Colchester co-produce this evocative theatrical adaptation by Sabrina Mahfouz, directed by Esther Richardson. Continue reading

SparkPlug: Rod Stewart, racism, and a Ford Capri

“I’ve got two dads. One’s black, so that makes me black, so I’m told.” It is with these words that David Judge begins SparkPlug, his semi-autobiographical account of growing up as a mixed-race child in the eighties and nineties. For the most part, he plays his father (also called Dave), examining  his own childhood through the eyes of a white man, married to a white woman, who is giving birth to a child fathered by a black man. Continue reading