GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
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Tales from the Front Line
Resonant accounts of the impact of the pandemic on the black community
FRUSTRATED: Kwame Bentil in Railway Worker
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
HENRY BELL is fascinated by the underlying curiosities and contradictions of one of the great poets of the Mediterranean
DAVID RENTON recommends a books that explores the ways in which disabled people are made to feel both of and not part of this world
TALAWA, Britain’s leading black theatre company, have released their third and fourth short dramatised monologues based on verbatim interviews with black key workers on the front line of the Covid crisis.
We hear the daily experiences of a railway worker and a part-time supermarket assistant, and their tales make for interesting comparisons and contrasts.
The good-humoured demeanour of Kwame Bentil’s middle-aged train despatch worker conceals a thinly veiled frustrated anger at the behaviour of many of the station travellers he meets.
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