Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter: Bumper Summer Edition! What's On Jul 30-Sep 2: Part I
Apphia Campbell and Woke! (Review). Plus Shakespeare's Sonnets, space aliens and a crime against disco.
The discovery of an unexploded Second World War bomb threatened to scupper my trip to Hull to see Apphia Campbell and Meredith Yarborough’s Woke! at Hull Truck Theatre. It was a big one, and closed the M18 near Goole for several hours before it was defused by an Army disposal team.
This is Europe — these things happen. The continent is full of ageing ordnance. I got to the theatre with 20 minutes to spare — not bad, but I could have done without the additional stress of travelling the obscure byways of Abolitionist MP William Wilberforce’s constituency on my longest drive since before lockdown.
What motivated me was curiosity. With a title like Woke! this time-shifting solo drama, set partly during the 1970s and partly during the 2014 Ferguson Riots, could have gone two ways — an irony-free journey into a certain type of political consciousness or something more distanced and critical. I was looking for insights. I wanted to know which it would be.
It was the form…