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New Festival of Theatre
Belgrade Theatre Coventry
Until 19 July
All events
FREE but donations welcome
More info at
www.inspiringcuriosity.co.uk
Two showcase events premiered yesterday to highlight the quality and
range of work on offer and to celebrate 50 years of Theatre in Education
at the Belgrade Theatre. The
Belgrade Young Black Theatre Company involves young people in devising
Broken
but I detect an extremely experienced hand at the tiller of this complex
and clever play about the effects of hot housing young academically
excellent students in order to massage statistics at schools. The story
involves a young deputy head teacher, Elaine Smith (Lorrein Kumbuwa),
holding an imaginary conversation with her own school friends about
following the vocation of teaching propelled by hero worship of their
own brilliant teacher, Miss Jolly.
They note
her dismissal of a gifted but awkward pupil Melody (Beth Bell) in favour
of Rene Gold (Esra Powell) who ‘plays the game’ better for as long as
she can before she cracks. It was
clever in involving dance particularly for the fight sequence and I
liked what my Father, a head teacher at ‘grimy primary’ school in
London’s east end, called the ‘rulers up, rulers down’ method of
teaching espoused by Elaine Smith. Her
nemesis, Nicola Berry (Imelda Miguni), loses the fight to teach her way
and leaves. The play raises questions about the differences between
education, the ‘drawing out’ of potential and training, and simple
inculcation of knowledge; cleverness and intelligence and ultimately
what education is actually for. At the risk of drawing the wrong
conclusions I saw a kind of Black History Girls here a la Alan Bennett. The
second premiere The Impossible Language
of the Time was a Chris O’Connell piece
from the Belgrade Senior Youth Theatre, a promisingly passionate
post-apocalyptic work involving a disparate group of dispossessed young
people who are protesting – some about their own condition as minorities
- but most about the death of an unarmed young man at the hands of
violent, politicised police. The piece
is rounded by the sister (Jessica Hobson) of the dead man sewing up her
lips to protest. Silent or noisy protests don’t work, and the band,
under the leadership of a kind of Russell Brand stand-up comic (Matthew
Williams), comes across an abandoned city and the chance to build their
own utopia. When they
can’t agree about anything the experiment seems doomed to failure. A
great quote from a Birmingham punk chap in the 1990s came into my mind;
‘You can’t organise anarchists’. But ‘Plus ca Change’ was the quote that
emerged in the play that set the seal on failure. The
telling scene was the ‘into work’ interview where one young woman
(Christine Smith) is forced to admit she hasn’t spent 35 hours on the
internet and filling in application forms for jobs because society
itself is falling to bits. She loses her only income for four weeks.
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