CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Strategies of resistance
SIMON PARSONS applauds the psychological study of prisoners dealing with a frighteningly oppressive world endured by far too many
Ross Tomlinson as Smash and Waj Ali as Valdez in The Unseen
[Manuel Harlan]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
The Unseen
Riverside Studios, London
CRAIG WRIGHT’s deft and thought-provoking script set in an isolation wing for political prisoners shows little evidence of its initial commission as a play about Jesus. Instead, the taut drama is based round the relationship of two contrasting prisoners and their violent yet troubled guard.
In near adjacent cells, Wallace, an articulate analytical doctor and Valdez, a reticent yet impassioned former actor have established a long-standing relationship based only on their verbal exchanges, frequently based around word games.
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