STEPHANIE BROWN draws attention to the hidden labour of the female embroiderers, and how a 19th century replica made no such error
Jellyfish
Bush Theatre, London
THE BUSH theatre’s current season goes from strength to strength. After the visceral intensity of Arinze Kene’s Misty and a timely revival of Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking comes Ben Weatherill’s touching Jellyfish.
All three plays are authentic and tender explorations of marginalised working-class communities. But where the first two focus on the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in London, Weatherill takes us to the shores of Skegness to bring society’s stigmas around disabilities to the surface.
It's there that the hardened Agnes (Penny Layden) and her bubbly 28-year-old daughter Kelly (Sarah Gordy), who has Down’s syndrome, have settled into an insular and loving pattern of life which is suddenly upset by the arrival of comic-loving arcade supervisor Neil (Ian Bonar) into Kelly’s universe.
ANGUS REID applauds the potential of an ambitious show about Gaza, and encourages it to keep its nerve
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
MAYER WAKEFIELD is gripped by a production dives rapidly from champagne-quaffing slick to fraying motormouth
MAYER WAKEFIELD recommends a musical ‘love letter’ to black power activists of the 1970s


