GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
A sour taste of the black British experience
MAYER WAKEFIELD recommends an emotionally charged drama on a family caught between two cultures
Disconsolate: Tok Stephen as Alvin with Debra Michaels (Vernice)
[Helen Murray]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
Strange Fruit
Bush Theatre London
FOLLOWING a superb revival of Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking last summer, the Bush Theatre continue their Passing the Baton initiative by staging this debut work by Kittitian-British writer Caryl Phillips.
Now better known as a novelist, Phillips was just 21 when Strange Fruit was first produced at the Sheffield Crucible in 1979. For someone of such youth it is a flawed yet remarkable work, as is Nancy Medina’s current production.
As you enter the theatre through the beaded doorway, you encounter Max Johns’s design incorporating all the classic features of a traditional West Indian sitting room — a ceramic pineapple, a stack of records, a portrait of the queen.
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