CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Theatre review: The Fellowship
A stirring tale of two Caribbean sisters in a world where their origin is a daily call to arms
[Robert Day]
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 Fellowship
Hampstead Theatre
1 July 2022
IT’S great to see Hampstead Theatre stepping out of its comfort zone with this unequivocal, in-depth penetration of a world where cultural origin is a daily call to arms.
The fellowship of the title is the bond between two sisters of Caribbean descent who painstakingly carve out uncharted lives in an England where being “black” not only shapes their lives but continues repeatedly to blitz them with heartbreak and trauma.
It’s also the baton-passing journey of three generations from Windrush, through the Broadwater Farm eruption, to the new, destabilising world of Brexit and Covid where the future is up for grabs, and all are at the mercy of forces greater than themselves.
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