MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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US border warfare
SIMON PARSONS investigates a play that is neither a family drama representative of a polarised US, nor symbolic drama of violent isolationism
CHARACTER OR SYMBOL? Peter De Jersey as Vet in Suzan-Lori Parks The Book of Grace
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ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
The Book of Grace
Arcola Theatre, London
THIS three-hander by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks could have been a straightforward domestic drama, with the return of an estranged son and former soldier to the house of his domineering, xenophobic, border-guard father, Vet, on the entreaty of his eternally optimistic wife, Grace, who believes reconciliation is possible.
The scaffold and barbed-wire border fence spanning the living room set, and the divergent opening monologues delivered by the isolated characters, immediately divests us of such a simple reading.
Vet, played with unpredictable hostility and simmering fury by Peter De Jersey, reveres the fence and his uniform. Ambivalent about his son’s return, he is concerned that Buddy will intrude on his vigilant isolationism and steal some of the limelight from an upcoming award ceremony in his honour.
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