Posted at 17:36h
in
Reviews,
Theatre
The Stasti Theatre company present their ever pertinent new production
Misidentity at the
Lost Theatre in Vauxhall, South London; a play seeking to challenge the pervasively negative perceptions of teenagers, in particular those from less than ideal social backgrounds. ‘Behind every stereotype’ reads the tagline ‘is a person. Behind every person, is a story’. True, some stereotypes have a shred of veracity but even then, as
Misidentity sets out to remind us, life is far more complicated than mere stereotypes can reveal.
Using a mix of prose and poetry, this multi-layered piece follows the beautifully entangled, if not exactly rosy, story of a group of school kids; most of them from the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks, all of them friends, enemies or lovers. They are bookish, bolshie, sensitive, foulmouthed, boy-crazy, independent, mindless followers, freethinkers...
A cult novel that still has as much relevance today as it did when it was first imagined in 1962, A Clockwork Orange has been adapted many times; most famously by Stanley Kubrick in the 1971 film. New Yorkers Ed DuRante (words) and Fred Carl (music) are the latest to embark on this endeavor, promising to return to the original source of Anthony Burgess’ book and most importantly, his last chapter of redemption and hope which was missing from the first editions of the novel and the famous film.
The slippery definitions of sanity are at the centre of Joe Penhall’s audacious play, Blue/Orange. The piece premiered at the National Theatre in 2000, with an all-male cast including British titans Chiwetel Ejiofor and Bill Nighy.
The production currently on at the Arcola Theatre, East London features an all-female line up, a device through which director Femi Elufowoju Jr. hopes to challenge the idea of certain traits being considered typically male or female.
The hitherto relatively harmonious working relationship of two psychiatrists, Dr Hilary (Helen Schlesinger) and her subordinate Dr Emily (Esther Hall aka the mum in the BT ad campaign) is thrown into disarray when they are confronted with the case of Juliet (Ayesha Antoine), a young woman of African origin who claims that oranges are blue and that she is the daughter of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada and a Congolese émigré. 