Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter: Pilot Theatre's 'Woke' Drama Noughts & Crosses

It ticked the boxes. Was it any good?

Effie Ansah as Sephy and James Arden as Callum in Pilot Theatre’s Noughts & Crosses. Photo credit: Robert Day 6.

Pilot Theatre’s adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s children’s novel Noughts & Crosses, won the Excellence In Touring category at the UK Theatre Awards 2019. The script for the York-based theatre company, by Londoner Sabrina Mahfouz, was published and added to the drama syllabus. It’s now a mainstream educational text.

Something pretty special, then? I honestly went with high hopes, having great respect for Pilot’s pioneering brand of socially relevant, high-tech, stylish shows for teenagers and young adults.

Sometimes ‘woke’ theatre is good — or at least has good things in it: Apphia Campbell’s solo piece (actually called Woke) brought the real-life character of black revolutionary Assata Shakur into vivid existence with little more than some cardboard boxes and a 1970s-style Bakelite telephone.

And Knaive Theatre’s Us (Post 23/3), miraculously created and presented online during lockdown, explained disparities in Covid mortality rates between ethnic communities in a way that was driven by ideology rather than subsequent data. But Kamal Khan’s script for Knaive delivered a terrific family drama that left me longing for a second instalment.

So ‘woke’ doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Though in this case, I’m afraid, it did.

Malorie Blackman’s ‘Noughts & Crosses’ series of dystopian novels for children is set in an alternative world in which an African empire colonised Europe 500 years ago. The occupation of the UK has congealed into a segregated regime that mirror-images apartheid in South Africa or the Jim Crow era in the United States. It’s a neat idea — you can set up your fictional world how you want — and by all accounts the novels are richly imagined.

In Pilot’s version, the checker-board squares and cubes of the set, replicated in the patterned costumes of protagonists Sephy and Cullum, hinted at a schematic production built around post-modernist ideas of ‘structural’ racism. Structural, in this context, means something much more specific than just ‘embedded’ or ‘widespread’. It refers to a specific set of theories about how race-based ‘privilege’ or ‘underprivilege’ manifest themselves in the formation of the group identities ‘black’ or ‘white’. The classic, liberal, Enlightenment understanding that every person is a unique individual with a unique set of baggage is now, it seems, strictly for the birds.

And so the stage was set for some Brechtian-style political theatre. You know the sort of thing — collapsing the fourth wall, adding a narrator who directly addresses the audience, song and dance routines that drip bitter irony. Instead, director Esther Richardson opted for a distinctly bourgeois style of quasi-naturalism that weakened the power of the chequer-board set.

But Sabrina Mahfouz’s lacklustre script was the real problem. It presented us with a pair of teenage-lovers-across-the-divide whose quarrels were based on petty, mutual misunderstanding — letters going astray etc — rather than upon an ideological rift that would have put a challenging philosophical debate in front of a youthful audience.

For example, Sephy channelled the ideology by saying people who benefit from the historical legacy of structural racism are responsible for the crimes of their forebears — unless they work to dismantle their privilege. Callum might have responded that individuals are only responsible for their own crimes.

But that didn’t happen. It couldn’t, because the critical social justice thinking that suffused the endeavour is incapable of that kind of debate. So despite the histrionics of a plot which included terrorist bombs, kidnappings, and even noble speeches from the scaffold, there was a gaping lack of conflict at the heart of the drama.

The sex lacked chemistry, and happened in the most red-flaggy of circumstances. In fact, the Mills & Boon-style naffness of the sex scene left me feeling very uneasy. On the evidence of this play, the ‘progressive’ element in society is going backwards in its understanding of the issues around sexual consent.

The only scene that worked, physically, as gut-wrenching, visceral theatre was a particularly nasty incident of school bullying. But then, we all know bullying seeks weakness and doesn’t need any reason — let alone a political one.

Steph Asamoah and Abiola Efunshile as the bullies. Photo credit: Robert Day...

In short, this was a didactic production that knew what it thought and wanted you to think the same. In this respect, it had much in common with a preachy School Assembly. It didn’t explain much about the actual forces at work in this globalised world to increase inequality. But then, critical race theory is obsessed with stuff that started to fall away at least 40 years ago.

The kids in the audience were very patient, considering.

Noughts & Crosses tours nationwide until April.

That’s all for this week, folks. I’m still having laptop issues and a fair portion of yesterday evening and this morning was devoted to fixing them. I hope you enjoy what I was able to produce — and hopefully next week will be easier.

Liz x