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Theatre Review A hugely edifying experience

Courage and resilience of ordinary people rendered with tenderness and warmth, writes MARY CONWAY

NW Trilogy
The Kiln
Brent London

 

THE London Borough of Brent has been, since WWII, a microcosm of the multicultural Britain we know today. And what the Kiln Theatre shows us in the three short, commissioned plays that form the warmly affectionate NW Trilogy is the momentum and natural humanity of the people who struggled back then to make sense of the life they live with us now.

These are not plays about the past although they are set in the 1970s and before. Instead, they are a window into the souls of many who grace our streets today.

Conceived as a contribution to the mayor’s London Borough of Culture, Brent 2020, the three plays are freestanding yet deeply interconnected.

First comes Moira Buffini’s Dance Floor — a beautifully focused and crystal-clear story in which two huge-hearted but over-burdened Irish cleaners etch their way through a shamefully hostile world.

This is followed by Life of Riley in which writer Roy Williams explores the deep and complex bond between a mixed-race girl and her seemingly wayward, Caribbean-born father, set against a backdrop of the profound and very public racism as articulated by Enoch Powell and the then National Front.

Lastly, Suhayla El-Bushra’s Waking Walking takes us into the intimate home life of the East African Asian Lakani family where Anjali Lakani is employed in 1976 at the very same factory where Mrs Desai launches the ground-breaking Grunwick Strike the same year.  

What ties all these plays together is their ability to transport us into the tiny details of these wonderfully authentic lives and enable us to feel the reality of culture adjustment and what it means to be unknowingly at the forefront of a revolutionary force.

Meanwhile the focus on music as the powerful, non-verbal message to the heart of all who have been dragged from their roots, illuminates all three plays and enables us to step into the characters’ skins and feel their desperate alienation.  

The cast are without exception excellent and should pride themselves on encapsulating not only these communities and not only Brent, but the population of a Britain illuminated by people of grit and courage who have congregated here, waved aside hostilities and through simple lives fought for a better world.

Utterly heart-warming.   
 Ends October 9 2021. Box Office: [email protected]

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