Nina Raine's Consent at the National Theatre

I'd reviewed Nina Raine's Tribes in Singapore when Pangdemonium staged it; it glimmered with the warmth of empathy, where a family reconnects with their son and brother after years of indifference to his disability. Her new play Consent has none of that. It's brutal. Empathy is just another weapon in a war of attrition. Consent is about rape and sexual consent and the indifference of the law, but it's also a portrait of the wounds that marriage leaves when yes and no get muddled. This review of Consent was first published by Exeunt Magazine.

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I like to think you never really learn how to fight with someone until you’ve been married to them. I speak from experience. These are the fights you can only have when you know exactly which layer of scar tissue to dig a switchblade into so that it will bleed out slowly and painfully, and that will take you days – no, weeks – to stanch the wound with forgiveness and apologies. Maybe it’s the legality of the marriage contract that does it, the signing of which is at once a surrender and a liberation. And both legality and marriage take the floor in Nina Raine’s exquisitely devastating new play, Consent.

Consent circles closely around rape, and sexual consent is the play’s main artery. Three middle-aged couples, mostly close friends and mostly in the legal profession, are navigating the affairs of the heart over copious amounts of alcohol in their cozy living rooms – as well as a court case at work. Two of the male barristers are on opposing sides of a rape trial: the by-the-book, conscientious Tim (Pip Carter) as prosecutor for the crown, and the cerebral, self-righteous Ed (Ben Chaplin) defending the alleged rapist. Ed and his wife, Kitty (Anna Maxwell Martin) have just had a baby, and are good friends with another high-powered barrister couple, Jake (Adam James) and Rachel (Priyanga Burford), whose marriage holds more than just a few secrets. Then there’s Kitty’s alluring best friend, the actress Zara (Daisy Haggard), who bemoans the lack of female roles written the way the Ancient Greeks’ were – fiery, fiendish goddesses storming across the stage.

Zara gets her wish. Raine brings her scalpel to the dissection of the human heart when it comes to love, marriage, relationships, fidelity and revenge, flaying every part of it with clinical precision. While examining why the violent, repulsive act of rape still evokes such polarising responses in society, be it victim-blaming, slut-shaming or “she said no, but she meant yes”, Raine maps the justifications and excuses that come with consent onto the unruly territory of marriage. Women aren’t only treated as physical possessions in the courtroom, where a rape survivor, Gayle (Heather Craney) realises she’s been stonewalled by the system, reduced to just another statistic. One weeping husband shouts at his wife: “He’s stolen you, the fucking thief” – and it’s clear she’s become a possession in marriage as well.

There’s a symmetry to Consent. The yes-no of it, the husband-wife, the thinking-feeling, the black-white, the right-wrong, the sorry-not sorry. The brutal arguments that run through the play, pitting one side against another, are then themselves inverted, where couples seem to fall into a mirror and come out the other side to find themselves horribly disoriented instead of reflected the way they think they will be. Director Roger Michell doesn’t just position his couples as contenders in a ring; he shifts the ring itself, flipping entrances and exits and positions of power, where every physical side taken on stage also means an alignment with one person or one belief against another. On Hildegard Bechtler’s clever, automated set, the detritus of crumbling marriages disappears and reappears, sliding soundlessly back onto the surface. The fights are long, draining and melodramatic, and their irrationality and relentlessness feels deliberate. Fights are never rational. They’re bloody and frustratingly repetitive, and make every victory feel like a pyrrhic one.

But Raine leavens her lacerating dialogue with generous lashings of humour. Consent may be exhausting, but it’s also darkly, overwhelmingly funny, even at its bleakest points. Her words find the perfect conduit through a stunning cast of seven who inhabit spiky characters hard to sum up with a collection of adjectives. But it is the on-stage coupling of Maxwell Martin as Kitty and Chaplin as Ed who are the most luminous of them all. She’s the proud empath to his detached logician. You feel entire conversations pass between them in the glances they exchange behind backs.

So much is stuffed into Consent. It’s also a tirade against the dispassionate gaze of the law and never lets you forget it; the barristers may well be wearing signs declaring ‘us lawyers are assholes’. But this also means that some of the stuffing shows at the seams. Raine wants us to mull over how rape culture is embedded in what is spoken and done and dismissed behind the closed doors of domestic life, but while Craney as rape survivor Gayle is absolutely gutting, her character sometimes feels like a convenient narrative device to bind this team of elite barristers to the muck of the real world. And while Consent wanders the infinite grey area between ‘yes’ and ‘no’, the symmetry that Raine and Michell revel in throughout the play, through wordplay and imagery, can feel just a tiny bit too on the nose.

But Fate adores its symmetry, its beginnings and endings. There’s a touch of the Greek with all of this: the hubris, the vengeance, the downfalls, the redemptions. What do we mean in a marriage when we say yes, and compromise, when we really want to say no, this is a dealbreaker? What do we mean when we say no to the person we both love and hate, when we are dying to say yes, I want you back, I want to work this out? It’s not just the big yes-no questions that get an airing, but the tiny ones as well: will you fold the laundry, will you have another glass of wine, will you tell me the truth about this text message? I’m not giving anything away by saying that Consent, in a way, ends as it begins, with a small gesture of an invitation. Say yes.

PRODUCTION INFORMATION
Writer: Nina Raine
Director: Roger Michell
Cast includes: Adam James, Anna Maxwell Martin, Ben Chaplin, Priyanga Burford, Pip Carter, Heather Craney and Daisy Haggard
Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler
Lighting Designer: Rick Fisher
Music: Kate Whitley
Sound Designer: John Leonard
Running dates: 28 March - 17 May, 2017

Snow in Midsummer at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

(Disclaimer: this is one of my stream-of-consciousness reviews, stuffed with rambly excitement and tangents.)

I recently made the trek up to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Snow in Midsummer, the 13th-century Chinese classic by Guan Hanqing also known as The Injustice to Dou E, in a radical new adaptation by playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig and directed by Justin Audibert. Audience members filtering into the velvety Swan Theatre may have been enchanted by a large tapestry in the style of a Chinese ink painting draped over the stage, or the trill of birds, lutes and flutes. Scottish actress Katie Leung, girlish and coy, is trying to sell her weavings to those sitting in the front row. But this is all clever misdirection that relies on certain expectations of “the Oriental play”. Leung scampers off stage and – bam! – the chintzy tapestry falls, neon lights set the stage ablaze, a DJ on the overhang above the stage is dropping some heavy beats, and we’ve been transported to what looks like the heart of present-day Hong Kong.

It’s a gritty urban space called New Harmony, where the well-heeled industrialist Tian Yun (Wendy Kweh) is set to purchase a large factory from the young tycoon Handsome (Colin Ryan), who’s excited to finally embark on a round-the-world vacation with his boyfriend Rocket (Andrew Leung). But what would Snow in Midsummer be without a festering family secret and a delightfully vengeful spirit? Katie Leung’s Dou Yi claws her way out of the grave to haunt Tianyun’s seven-year-old daughter, Fei-Fei (Zoe Lim), and a dark curse begins to spread across the ailing town.

Seeing this slick, sexy production at the Swan Theatre had me imagining what it would be like if the posh Beijing People’s Art Theatre did a contemporary adaptation of Cao Yu’s hyper-incestuous plot-twisty Thunderstorm (1934) in Kardashian reality TV style. (They would never, but a girl can dream.) Audibert’s flamboyant, confident take on Snow in Midsummer blends the tropes of popular Hong Kong television serials – the kind that knows exactly how to whet and sate the appetites of millions of viewers – with high classical drama. The Yuan Dynasty play pre-dates Shakespeare by about 200 years, but through a Western lens there’s inevitably a touch of the Shakespearean about it, and Snow in Midsummer is a veritable feast of big, meaty dramatic arcs. The emphatic, flickering neon signs on stage are emblazoned with the themes of the play, including 正义 (zheng yi; justice), 冤枉 (yuan wang; usually translated as being falsely or wrongly accused of something, but loaded with a particularly potent sense of bitterness), and 无辜 (wu gu; innocence) – obvious to a Chinese-speaking audience but a nice touch of subliminal messaging to those who don’t understand the language.

This production is showy and grand, utterly horrifying but also very funny – a vivid, violent death in one scene may immediately be followed by a bawdy, debauched one (my favourite scene might have been the three People’s Army soldiers exchanging advice on flirty text messaging), a nod to the fact that Shakespeare isn't the only one blending epic deaths, buffoons and the use of comic relief. Sure, the second half drags its feet with the technical exposition required to set up a series of “oh no they didn't!” plot twists. But, oh, these outrageous, juicy plot twists, they had my Hong Kong drama serial loving heart. And they would probably have your heart too, if you gasped when Darth Vader declared to Luke Skywalker: “No, I am your father!”

And then there are the homages to Asia’s particular genre specialty – the genuinely terrifying horror film. Did I spy the long-haired Sadako from The Ring (1998) in one of Dou Yi’s appearances? The ghost’s relentless desire for revenge immediately brings up Ju-On (2000), the grudge that keeps on giving – and there are strong echoes of the Pang Brothers’ The Eye (2002), in which a cornea transplant goes horribly wrong. Of note to those who have already seen the play – in Singapore, the Human Organ Transplant Act was only passed in 1987, and huge debate across members of all religions surrounded its amendments in 2004; the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore issued a fatwa in 2007 so that Muslims could also come under the Act. Even as a secular nation where there’s a strong separation of religion and state, the connection between organ donation and the afterlife was something that we, as a country, wrestled with well into the late 20th and early 21st century.

Which leads me to one of my favourite things about this contemporary update of Guan’s play: its matter-of-fact inclusion of the supernatural as part of a daily lived experience. “Chinese scholars” don’t need to tell you that strong beliefs in the supernatural still exist in the East – the same way Western/English scholars don’t need to tell you that strong beliefs in the supernatural do still exist in the West. Whether you have deep convictions and roots in Christianity or Taoism, one thing is for certain – both religions and cultures are tied to a strong belief in the spiritual and supernatural. And these everyday beliefs are everyday fixtures in Snow in Midsummer, woven into the play and normalised beautifully and generously. In several scenes, there’s a meticulous altar to the Goddess of Mercy and, later on, an instantly recognizable funeral altar laden with food and gifts to the deceased. None of these cultural traditions are “a curiosity” – in the play, a routine visit to a temple is part of the fabric of everyday living the way one might go for weekly mass or a bible study. Superstition and science not only rub up against each other – they coexist.

Snow in Midsummer is a good exemplar of how a complicated Chinese classic can become a pacy contemporary adaptation – one that’s reverent in its treatment of Asian work and translation, but also deliciously irreverent when it comes to playing with tropes and conventions, whether it’s melodrama or horror. This production marks the beginning of the RSC’s Chinese Translations Project, and – permit me this Asian stereotype – it looks like a downright auspicious one.

Stray thoughts, including mild spoilers:

• I’m pretty sure there are people in Hong Kong whose names are indeed Handsome and Rocket. (Names I’ve come across: Virus, Bubbles, Drizzle, Apple, you get the idea.)

• This could have been completely arbitrary, but I loved how the various UK accents mapped relatively well onto their Chinese counterparts. Katie Leung has a Scottish lilt, and her character Dou Yi is also from the north. Wendy Kweh is from Singapore, and I definitely mapped my archetype of the affluent, practical Singaporean businesswoman onto Tianyun. Like I said, it was probably unintentional, but so much fun to imagine.

• I totally called the death by rat poison. I KNEW IT.

My Country; A Work in Progress at the National Theatre

I recently reviewed My Country; A Work in Progress at the National Theatre, which reminded me distinctly of Wild Rice's Cooling Off Day (2011), a piece of testimonial/verbatim theatre documenting the political resonances and the public's response to the watershed 2011 parliamentary elections in Singapore. I wrote about it in great detail here.

The following review of My Country was first published in Exeunt Magazine.

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On June 24, 2016, as the results of the EU referendum began pouring in, my colleagues and I were watching our computer screens in a newsroom in Singapore with morbid fascination and sickening dread. The percentages sank – 51%, 50%, 49% – as did our stomachs. Our more utilitarian fellow citizens made a point of swarming currency exchange outlets in the central business district to change their strong Singapore dollars for the plummeting pound sterling; money changers shuttered and refused to sell any of their reserves.

The fallout that filtered through to our side of the world, a former British colony no less, left us baffled. Had the majority of UK residents understood what they were voting for? Did David Cameron just up and quit, humming a merry tune at his final press conference? Who was going to steer the UK out of this mess? And yet much of it also sounded familiar, overlapping with socio-political sentiments felt halfway around the world: the anti-immigration rhetoric, the promise of jobs and healthcare, the affluent island nation wary of its neighbours.

My Country; A Work in Progress is the National Theatre’s first attempt at dealing bluntly with the reverberations of Brexit and the country’s spectrum of responses to the referendum, and there’s a brevity to it that reflects, possibly, the haste with which this piece seems to have been put together. It’s an ambitious title – My Country – one that attempts to speak for all of the UK through its vox populi, and perhaps it isn’t surprising that the 75-minute result is a selection of highlights rather than a textured interrogation of the whole.

The hardworking cast of seven, suited and suitcased, embody and personify seven regions in the UK, playing up the accents, the archetypes, and the cultural quirks: Caledonia (Stuart McQuarrie), the North East (Laura Elphinstone), Northern Ireland (Cavan Clarke), Cymru (Christian Patterson), the East Midlands (Seema Bowri), the South West (Adam Ewan), and Westminster, the seat of power, Britannia herself (Penny Layden; she’s affectionately referred to by the other regions as Britney). Britannia has convened her various regions to observe the vote and to speak on behalf of their people against a backdrop of desks and ballot boxes. But by divvying up the country according to its geography and relying on the stereotypes that go with them, this theatrical United Kingdom predictably remains a Divided one.

A team of ten from the National Theatre gathered interviews with residents from across the country, aged 9 to 97, which were then knitted together by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and director Rufus Norris. Excerpts of these interviews are presented, by the personifications of these seven regions, as collections of pithy quotes: “If you’re going to export bombs, you’re going to import people,” declares a resident of Wales; Boris Johnson’s “the EU would be a lobster” speech gets a gleeful impersonation. The interviews have been judiciously edited to reflect a range of responses, with both Leave and Remain camps rubbing up against each other. The conversation moves through a selection of topics: childhood memory, nostalgia for a pastoral history, class privilege, welfare and benefits, geographical boundaries, those who are suspicious of immigrants and others who are more compassionate – the piece is at its best with these intimate verbatim interviews, with Duffy and Norris sustaining their blend of playfulness and pathos. The digestible soundbites are crowd-pleasing, accompanied with laughter and recognition, but they also make it hard to see My Country as more than a compilation of quotable quotes, the sentiments of which have already been paraded endlessly through the news.

My Country wants desperately to speak for the universal and the personal at the same time – the play’s subtitle, A Work in Progress, acknowledges the impossible goal it has set for itself. Halfway through the show, each of the seven regions wheels out a buffet of local foods. It’s an easy gimmick: a Talisker single malt from the Scots; Geordie pizza from the North East. It strikes me that My Country is an amuse bouche of a political documentary, one that summarises the UK’s complex diversity without getting its hands too dirty in the trenches that drive it apart.

My Country; A Work in Progress is on at the National Theatre until 22nd March 2017, followed by a national tour. Click here for more details. 

DIRECTED BY Rufus Norris
WRITTEN BY Text from interviews with people across the UK and Carol Ann Duffy
CAST INCLUDES Seema Bowri, Cavan Clarke, Laura Elphinstone, Adam Ewan, Penny Layden, Stuart McQuarrie, Christian Patterson

(Flashback) Cry, Trojans! by The Wooster Group at SIFA 2014

We've been looking at the work of The Wooster Group in terms of hybrid performance here at Goldsmiths, so I thought I'd post my review of Cry, Trojans! that the Group performed in Singapore a couple of years ago. (Bearing in mind that I was a younger reviewer then, and was still figuring out voice, form, content and readership in criticism... In retrospect, there were some good points here, but clumsily conveyed. So many redundant adjectives, ugh.) This review was first published in The Straits Times.

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Stupefyingly dull, offensive, and an insult to Shakespeare? Or a work that pulls the rug out from under every sacred convention of theatre?

Cry, Trojans! (which I might subtitle Cry, Unsuspecting Audiences!) is all of these things and more, a 2½-hour determined trudge through the minefield of Troilus & Cressida, one of the Bard's most problematic plays. Ostensibly about the doomed love story between the title characters from Troy, who pledge their love and then are ripped apart in two consecutive sets of betrayals (one political, one personal), the play is framed within a larger tale of betrayal of the Trojans by the Greeks, shunting aside the "protagonists" and initial bursts of ribald humour for a darkly violent, gloomy glimpse at war.

The Wooster Group shocked their American audiences with what seemed to be "redface", the blatant cultural appropriation of Native American history; the Trojans are styled as a fictional tribe, feathers and all, dressed in grungy traditional dress that, at first glance, might have been pulled off the rack from a used costume store, yet is morbidly striking – some of the warriors sheath themselves in busts of Greek statues, worn on their backs like scalped human trophies.

At the production's premiere in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Group horrified, even revolted, World Shakespeare Festival audiences, who derided the ensemble for poor acting and delivery and an utter disregard for text, and demanded "good theatre technique" and some sort of coherence. Many said they were connoisseurs of experimental theatre, but disdained this baffling experiment taking place in the heart of Shakespeare's hometown.

It is on this polarising final production that the six-week Singapore International Festival of Arts closes with a startling bang. I myself emerged from theatre in slight delirium, with a bit of a tension headache and a churning stomach – but mostly from the prospect of looking at this production, piece by piece.

The work does not necessarily reward the patient. It is a demanding, challenging production, sometimes tedious and sometimes difficult to follow, and riddled with problems – the most basic of which involves having an all-white cast replicate, to the point of slapstick, Native American customs and culture. It is a dramatic device practically prostrating itself for controversy and criticism, and yet I found myself inexplicably tugged along by the silent undercurrents of this conceptual melting pot: Will the conqueror ever fully understand what oppression means to the conquered?

The Wooster Group is unabashed about this futility – no, we will never come to terms with the blood we have shed on Native American soil, and all we have left is a sort of play-acting within which we forcibly confine ourselves. The cast denigrates themselves, almost self-flagellatingly, before the stereotype of the Native American.

Director Elizabeth LeCompte has stated that the starting point for this work was Shakespearean English as a second language for many American performers; layered over that beginning are interruptions of historical baggage, technological innovation, and the Group's deliberate and fiercely single-minded pursuit of a perfection that only its ensemble seems privy to, every movement and declaration carefully calibrated to fit a larger and mysterious blueprint.

The School of the Arts Studio Theatre has been reshaped into a sort of version of the Group's Performing Garage in New York City, and its mostly bare stage is surrounded by television screens, with two DJs off to the side doing a live sound mix. It quickly becomes clear that the cast are miming gestures from other films and video excerpts being played on these screens, whether in some sort of barren Inuit landscape, or the high melodrama of the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty in glamorous Old Hollywood.

But which is which? Are the videos a simulacrum for the action on stage? Or are the gestures that are copied universal ones, to be read across circumstance and context? Some earn a chilling edge, when the glitz of leading Hollywood ladies flirting with their men is transposed onto the shocking delivery of Cressida into lecherous enemy hands. Others, when female cast members suddenly erupt into song, feel like a lazy gimmick.

But when these moments work, they gain a stark resonance: all that will be performed has already been performed, and history, in the same way, will mimic what has gone before. Troilus and Cressida use the same gestures of violence on each other as the Trojans do in their pow-wow over what to do with Helen: Return their prized princess to the Greeks and end the war? Or stubbornly keep her and their honour at the risk of bloodshed? They trade blows, they convulse, they tuck their hair behind their ears.

LeCompte shears off several scenes from the Greek camp, which mostly expound on the relationships between the Greeks, and focuses instead on the inner turmoil of the Trojan camp. The Greeks were initially played by members of London's Royal Shakespeare Company to maximise a clash of performance styles, but the work has continued to evolve since its premiere in 2012. Now, The Wooster Group takes on all the parts, donning masks when they play the Greeks, with a doubling of parts that turns enemies into friends and heroes into villains. The same actor who plays the lovelorn Troilus (Scott Shepherd) also plays the cruel Achilles; he also plays Cressida's scheming father Calchas, who brokers her trade with the Greeks.

These multilayered characters seem to be a microcosm for the production itself. So much is at play in every scene: a deconstruction of the idea of acting, the repetition of movement across genres and art forms, the bursts of live, dubsteppy music, the echoes of recordings of previous iterations of the same production, a Mobius strip folding onto itself.

Conceptually, Cry, Trojans! is fascinating – but also the equivalent of painstakingly pulling apart a complicated metronome. Its inner parts may be gloriously and endlessly fascinating, but it always trots out the same rhythm. It is almost as if the Group has created the machinery of a universe all to themselves, and I could not help but feel like a sidelined observer, only able to chip away at the surface of an automaton, its cogs and gears a-whirr. I puzzled over the actors' deliberate dispassion in delivering their lines, but was sucked in by the conscientiousness with which they sought to convey this devil-may-care attitude.

One thing is for sure – this is Shakespeare as you have never seen it, and might never see again, in a tide of ceaseless contradictions.

Astronauts of Hartlepool at the Vault Festival

This review of Astronauts of Hartlepool was first published in Exeunt Magazine.

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Science fiction on a shoestring? Hartlepool has you covered. Astronauts by the hundreds, the thousands, have been pulled out of orbit and towards Earth by this generally overlooked northeastern town. And in the musty, humid Pit chamber of the Vaults, you can almost smell the malaise of the forgotten backwater. Against this post-industrial backdrop, a Brexit fable plays out – but not quite the fable one might expect. Astronauts of Hartlepool is deeply ambitious and darkly funny – a twisty, turny, and revelatory look at who the ‘aliens’ in our midst truly are.

The play opens with two women, both in black jumpsuits, on opposite ends of the otherwise bare stage.

“Don’t jump!” Aidan (Sophie Steer) yells at Nadia (Rakhee Thakrar), who’s perched on what is possibly the edge of a bridge or cliff.

Nadia’s astonished. She turns. “You can see me?” she asks, slightly incredulous, a woman accustomed to being on the periphery of everyone’s vision.

Now Aidan’s a bit suspicious. “…I didn’t think you all look the same,” she tests the words in her mouth.

Oh, okay, I think, in the middle of their remarkable rapid-fire banter, this is going to be one of those direct sci-fi analogies of acceptance mapped metaphor for metaphor onto our daily lives. Nadia’s astronaut-immigrant is presumably the extra-terrestrial alien arriving on a hostile, xenophobic Earth, and Aidan interjects at this point that Hartlepool is “obviously better than where you’re from”.

Mild spoiler: it isn’t one of those sci-fi plays. Playwright Tim Foley has a glorious mass of science fiction tropes at his disposal, and he lobs each one at the audience whenever we think we’ve got the mechanics of the play figured out.

There’s a taste of the stable time loop of Groundhog Day or All You Need Is Kill in the opening scenes, as Aidan encounters ‘Nadia’ again and again. But once the rules of these occurrences are established, Foley pulls the rug out from under us and introduces his sprawling, ever-unfurling multiverse, a series of stacked alternate dimensions from which an endless stream of Nadias arrives week after week. (Did I spy a hint of that Doctor Who–River Song anachronic order of meetings?) Rakhee Thakrar is spot-on in her varied portrayals of the various Nadias, each slightly different from the next, her body language and tiny tics fleshing out each complete character. She and Sophie Steer have wonderful chemistry, their energy unflagging as they – under Siobhan Cannon-Brownlie’s excellent direction – single-handedly conjure up the lush, complex world they find themselves in with hardly any props and the minimal use of lighting and some well-timed blackouts.

So much is packed into a production of just over an hour, as we discover each character’s back story, their disenfranchisement, and the compromises and choices they’ve been compelled to make in order to leave terrible circumstances behind or to attempt to change a dying, rotting world. There are several other mind-bending twists to the plot, which allow the audience to put together the puzzle bit by bit, scene by scene, until the moments arrive, in quick succession, where the pieces click together ever so satisfyingly. The audience is worked hard to get the larger picture at play, but it’s deeply rewarding when that image comes into focus.

It’s hard to avoid the baggage of political didacticism that comes with this theatrical analysis of current affairs and the immigration crisis, but the creative team does this as deftly as they can, choosing subliminal messaging and bleak humour over slogans and feel-good advocacy. Astronauts of Hartlepool suggests that we are all aliens, that we are all astronauts – but also that the situation at hand doesn’t have easy answers and that every stubborn conviction comes with thick layers of accumulated bitterness or grief. The sins of the fathers and mothers are visited on their sons and daughters, over and over again. One terrible, misunderstood encounter can lead to decades of violence and exclusion.

Astronauts of Hartlepool is as sharply funny as it is deafeningly sad, a well-timed commentary about the times we live in – where a revolution can hinge on a tiny change, or where change can be failed by a revolution.

Produced by Hannah Tookey
Directed by Siobhán Cannon-Brownlie
Written by Tim Foley
Cast includes Sophie Steer and Rakhee Thakrar