Rise Up
Touring
5/5

OFTEN theatre in education lacks a sharp edge but Lisa Evans’s new play Rise Up cuts like a knife.

Detailing the story of the Freedom Riders, who risked their lives to fight the Jim Crow laws that segregated the US South in the 1960s, this play rides the full gamut of emotions, while managing to connect the past and the present with very few bumps in the road.

Evans was inspired to write the play when she was commissioned to write a piece responding to the question: “How will young people shape the future?”

She looked to history for an example of young people challenging injustice in a non-violent way and found it in a live stream of a group of Palestinians, motivated by their US antecedents, who called themselves Freedom Riders and challenged segregation by riding a bus from the Gaza Strip to Israel.

Evans’s inspired script, produced by the Theatre Centre company, interweaves the fearless feats of an organised underground movement with the futile conflicts of a modern theatre company with ease.

One moment, the cast are squabbling over stage directions, the next they are being torched alive on an interstate bus by members of the KKK.

The juxtaposition makes for frightening viewing.

Natalie Wilson’s production moves at a breakneck speed. The four-strong cast, assuming multiple roles, manage to keep the energy alive throughout and bring great truth to Evans’s piercingly poetic monologues which intersperse the play, with Edward Nkom as Ty and Kimisha Lewis as Dayz particularly assured.

But the frantic pace is not always to the play’s advantage.

Although there is a need for the pace to be maintained, it’s difficult not to feel that moments of stillness would benefit this otherwise inspired piece of theatre.

And inspiring it most certainly is. The ambition of Theatre Centre to try to provoke a younger generation into political action is never shied away from.

“It’s how you move the air before you” is a line repeated throughout the production and a post-show “revolution” on equality evokes uninhibited opinions from an articulate young audience who are encouraged to take the lessons of resistance and non-violent protest out onto their own streets.

Let’s hope they do.

Rise up tours nationally until December 4, details: theatre-centre.co.uk