“Remember me more than a fighting man and the choice I made for the greater plan”

‘Our War’ is directed by Andrew Ashaye & produced by Imole Theatre Company (Lola Oteh). Our War is an emotionally compelling story from the lens of the fellow Nigerians Ola, Tommy and Christian, as they travel from their native land Nigeria. Encouraged to partake in World War II as Nigeria at the time was a British colony; which left young men & women feeling as if they had no other choice or say in the matter, just wanting to make their mothers proud. Nigerian men & woman were not only having to leave sunny Nigeria, their families & parents; but the feeling of hope, unknowing whether they’d ever get reunited with their loved ones again. A flight with no guarantee of return, but of the sounds of explosive nuclear bombs, the height of World War II became their history.

After the play, I was keen to speak with Lola Oteh to hear what sparked her interest in the concept of ‘Our War’. Lola mentioned it was when she’d realised the vast absence of African & West Indian soldiers who were not widely acknowledged or recognised in being Britain’s key players fighting for the country.

Once Ola (the nurse), Tommy & Christian arrived to Britain, they experienced the national terror of war on the battlefield and the harsh realities of being Black in the army and in the local community. This entailed not only segregation for the coloured but their uniform differences to.

In conversation with Lola Oteh & Andrew Ashaye after the play, it became clear that Our War came together after an abundance of research from various sources from black cultural archives, etc. was carried out. Where autobiographies, real names, times & untold stories were incorporated into the play to ensure they portrayed life as realistically as possible during that era. Perfectly depicting the characteristics, mindsets & attitude of those in authority as well as the veteran desperately missing their motherland. ‘Our War’ perfectly dramatises the bravery of forgotten heroes, Black African and Caribbean men and women who contributed and made sacrifices for the war effort in Britain.

This production was majestically infused with elements of Nigerian culture through compelling dialogue & sweet singing in Yoruba; penetrating the audience hearts. Lola Oteh’s cultural influence was deeply embedded to create a platform in which original and innovative stories could be told. Drama and performance was greatly used in ‘Our War’ to magnify history bringing the past back to life and giving us a voice to stories that might not always be heard.

In this interview Rhys Payne interviews Hamed Amiri writer of The Boy With Two Hearts, adapted by Phil Porter now showing at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff.

You can find out more about the production and book tickets here.

Get the Chance supports volunteer critics like Rhys to access a world of cultural provision. We receive no ongoing, external funding. If you can support our work please donate here thanks.

The Sherman Theatre is well and truly Back in Play! The festival, which has everything from stand up to monologues to young writers showcases (all done in short form to allow you to safely see as much or as little on offer as you like), is headlined by ‘Radical Reinventions’, four short plays which put a new spin on a classic work of literature. (Hamlet is a F&£$boi and The Messenger, which both reinvent works by Shakespeare, premiered earlier this week).

The Sherman always has a knack for getting at the sinew and bones of a story, and this series is no exception. Performed in a socially distanced and visually striking cabaret setting (imagine that the Phantom of the Opera designed a circus tent and you’re halfway there), The Love Thief and Tilting at Windmills are two joyously irreverent and transcendent plays which argue that, while love may seem futile and dreams impossible, the adventure makes them worth the risk.

The Love Thief is written and performed by Rahim El Habachi and directed by Nerida Bradley, and is based on Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. Dressed in flames, Prometheus steals love instead of fire and gives it to humanity so they can love whomever they love regardless of gender. El Habachi, an actor and belly dancer, commands the stage from the second he appears – sensual, ethereal and lyrical, he relays his story like the Emcee via Elvira, all mischief and mysticism. The play gives a god’s eye view of modern Britain, its imperial ghosts and their ungodly scions who make it their life’s work to make life difficult for anyone they deem to be ‘different’. It also highlights the personal toll of activism, and how important it is to fight the tide of hatred and bigotry even when it threatens to consume you.

Tilting at Windmills is written and directed by Hannah McPake and performed by Mared Jarman, and is based on Miguel de Cervantes’ The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. Jarman is chaotic, heroic and mesmeric, gallantly sprinting around like Lancelot on a sugar rush. Using basic props and a whole lot of chutzpah (not to mention a rollicking Knights of Cydonia needle drop), Don Quixote and Sancho Plant-za attempt to squeeze a near-one-thousand-page book into a breathless (and hilariously meta-textual) thirty minutes. Cervantes makes an appearance as a Zardoz-like disembodied voice that boasts of his own greatness – opening up interesting avenues of the dialogue between authors and those adapting and performing their work, and how radically reinventing a text is what keeps it fresh, alive and relevant.

Ultimately, Prometheus has to decide whether hope is worth all the pain and the not knowing whether things will ever get better, and Quixote/Mared has to decide whether to stay in the fantasy or live in the real world. And yet, neither choice is a binary between staying or going, fantasy or reality. There will always be pain, and uncertainty – but there will always be hope, fun, and magic, hidden between the margins.

The Sherman is most definitely Back in Play and back to stay!

Back in Play season at the Sherman Theatre: 8 – 30 October

Review by
Barbara Hughes-Moore

Get the Chance supports volunteer critics like Barbara to access a world of cultural provision. We receive no ongoing, external funding. If you can support our work please donate here thanks.

Company of Sirens make a dynamic return to Chapter with Hitchcock Redux, two short plays that explore the elusive power of real (and reel) memories. Written and directed by Chris Durnall and funded by Arts Council of Wales/National Lottery, Hitchcock Redux dramatises and meditates on two traumatic events in Durnall’s life and the Hitchcock films with which are intertwined.

In the first play, Twelve Cabins Twelve Vacancies, Durnall recounts the time when, while watching the first television broadcast of Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1968, he learned that his father had died. The two are forever connected in his consciousness, and memories of both are shaped and distorted by each other. The second play, Souvenirs of a Killing, explores the tragic abduction and murder of a friend in 1973, the trauma of which is embodied and underscored by the film Vertigo. Both plays are performed by Durnall and Angharad Matthews (who also designed the set and costumes), and feature original music composed and performed live by Eren.

Twelve Cabins premiered onstage in 2019, and was performed along with Souvenirs online in March of this year. The lyrical writing and pensive performances resonated even through the screen – but onstage they are brought to vivid, visceral life. The sense of place, space and movement is powerful: Durnall moves as though monumentalised in grief, shifting between joyous reminiscence and solemn contemplation; Matthews moves ethereally, as light dances on the surface of rippling water; and the immersive music, composed and performed live by Eren, moves between original compositions and evocations of Hermann that cage the characters in a spiralling static state.

The women in Psycho and Vertigo are portrayed with more empathy in those films (and in these plays) than Hitchcock showed the actresses portraying them. Women encased in amber, both celluloid and corporeal, are objectified through movies and memories, their losses mourned through the membrane of grief and fiction. Durnall speaks not for them, but through them, their voices reanimated but recounted, living only through scribbled words on cigarette boxes (a subtly gorgeous image).

The set is plaintively sparse, evoking the ways in which the backgrounds of memories are often shadowed, blurred, or absent altogether; sometimes a face, a dress, a glance, is all we remember. Examining a memory can tarnish it, like buffing a broken mirror – it just makes the cracks cut deeper. In a piece for the Wales Art Review, Durnall argues that the (fictional) films and the (real life) losses ‘have become so inextricably linked with those moments that they have become artistic metaphors for the events themselves’. Whether watching scenes play out on a television set, or re-enacting Hitchcock’s dialogue, Psycho and Vertigo become a prism through which grief is reflected and refracted, and provide a kind of closure which is not always found in life.

The search for closure is a sentence which Hitchcock Redux leaves incomplete – purposefully so, because closure is by nature perpetually unfinished. But it also leaves you with the drive not only to explore your own connections between art and grief and memory, but the tools you’ll need along the way. Striking, pensive and poignant, it does not ask you to take the first step – it merely opens the door.

Hitchcock Redux is playing at Chapter through 16 October

Direct from the West End, the award-winning Mischief Theatre crew is back in Cardiff with a raucous new comedy. Groan Ups follows five characters through the trials and tribulations of primary school, high school, and the inevitable reunion years later when these supposed grownups dig up old rivalries, flirtations, and secrets thought long left on the playground.

Written by Mischief stalwarts Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, and directed by Kirsty Patrick Ward, Groan Ups is further proof the energy and creativity of Mischief Theatre is unmatched. Eschewing improv for dramedy, the ensemble has crafted a gleefully anarchic and surprisingly sweet show buoyed by an incredibly game cast. There’s Lauren Samuels as conscientious Katie, Dharmesh Patel as naughty Spencer, and Daniel Abbott as sweet, shy Archie, who becomes Spencer’s ride or die after an I, Spartacus moment with a dead hamster. Completing the quintet is nerdy Simon (Matt Cavendish) who obsessively and unrequitedly adores popular posh girl Moon (Yolanda Ovide).

We follow this famous five through three key stages in their lives: when they’re chaotic and demanding at age 6, angsty and hormonal at age 14, and regressive and regretful at age 30. The cast excellently evoke these different ages: Dharmesh Patel nails the faux-casual bravado of the teenage boy while Lauren Samuels plays a pitch perfect precocious toddler always running for teacher when the others misbehave. The ensemble’s effective characterization is buoyed by Fly Davis’ incredible and transportive sets which perfectly conjure the classrooms of your memories, cleverly using scale and exaggerated sizing to capture the feeling of towering over the chairs which once towered over you.

The first half might seem a little much at times, but it’s all brought round so beautifully in the second, with every seemingly-throwaway joke and character beat returned to with added meaning and bigger laughs. The second half also features Jamie Birkett as Chemise, an aspiring actress who Simon hires to play his girlfriend, who damn near stole the show with a single ‘aye’ and our hearts with everything that came after. Killian Macardle also draws laughs as a stern teacher in the first half and an overconfident alum in the second.

It might not quite reach the dizzying heights or the razor-sharp precision of The Play that Goes Wrong – but it doesn’t need to. And it ends on a genuinely meaningful note: the problem is not that we look into the past but that we do so with rose tinted glasses. Memories tend to dull the blade of experience, and Groan Ups captures all the pining, the teasing, and the worrying you’ve tried to forget; all the horror and the beauty of growing up and then realising you never really did. Nostalgia is a trick, because it fools you into believing your best days are behind you – but they are ahead, if you manage to maintain that sense of play and wonder.

Groan Ups concludes that we might not ever truly grow up – but we can grow, if we can keep that youthful sense of hope, fun and possibility. Good comedy is the hardest art form; great comedy is almost impossible. But Mischief have worked their magic once again.

Groan Ups is playing at the New Theatre Cardiff through Saturday 16th October.

Review by
Barbara Hughes-Moore

Get the Chance supports volunteer critics like Barbara to access a world of cultural provision. We receive no ongoing, external funding. If you can support our work please donate here thanks.

Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff. Itself an imposing building and host to much brilliant theatre and this was no exception as it hosted the first Welsh refugee story to be brought to the stage. The Boy With Two Hearts, is a play based on the book of the same name by local author Hamed Amiri and adapted for stage by Phil Porter.

The scene is set, it is Afghanistan in the year 2000. The Taliban are rapidly taking over the country and imposing intolerable laws, people speak out but sadly to their detriment as Hamed and his family soon discover.

Their lives change overnight and soon begins a race against time to leave their homeland…a race for survival. The play tells the story of how Hamed and his family embarked on their perilous journey to safety, the hardships and the dangers they encountered enroute, the people who were there to take from them what little they had and the humanity shown by others. It portrayed a family bound by love, by commitment to each other and by the courage and determination to succeed.

As the story unfolds we learn about each individual member of the family, their hopes, their desires, their dreams. It gives a realisation that people are the same the world over, all striving for the same things, the right to live a life without fear, without hardship and most importantly of all a life of freedom. During the play we also learn a lot about one of the brothers life-threatening condition and the treatment he so desperately needs.

The acting was incredible, within minutes you were convinced that this was the family themselves and they weren’t actors playing the parts. The set was grimly atmospheric, the addition of the displayed dialogue was genius and the live vocals created a haunting backdrop. The story played on your every emotion, it was heartfelt, thought provoking, humorous, happy, sad…and real. I can say with all honesty that this play not only made me happy and sad in equal measure but left me thinking, it made me realise how little I know about the plight of others and how little I can do to help

The Boy With Two Hearts written by Hamed Amiri, adapted for the stage by Phil Porter. Wales Millennium Centres’ first homegrown production since reopening and the first Welsh refugee story brought to the stage.

This true story moved me to tears, it was one of the most inspirational plays I’ve ever seen. This story could be happening today, with the recent events which has led to the fall of Kabul.

The play was performed by Hassam/Son (Shamail Ali) Hamed/Son (Farshid Rokey) Hussein/son (Ahmed Sakhi) Fariba/Mum (Gehane Strehler) Mohammed/Dad (Dana Haqjoo) and singer Elaha Soroor

In 2000, Hamed Amiri’s family have to leave their home and their life in Herat, Afghanistan. They need protection from the Taliban, who have issued a warrant to execute the mother, Fariba Amiri, for speaking out against the Taliban, demanding freedom for women’s rights. They also need medical help for the oldest son, Hussein, who has a rare, life-threatening heart condition.

Their journey leaving their home, learning to live with nothing, having to spend a long time on the road, never being safe, worrying every day whether they will ever make it to the UK, their “safe haven”, and having to put their lives into the hands of smugglers again and again is heart-breaking, one of many families who have left their lives behind to find safety in Europe and continue to do so.

Clothes hang from rafters above the stage in WMC and a disarray of suitcases and clothing are strewn around the edge of the stage. Creative stage captions set the scene and draw you in to the families fight and struggle but it’s not just about the hardship, it’s about fear, love, family, determination, courage and hope – these are the emotions that ignite a fire inside of you whilst you’re drawn into their powerful story.

The play is split between two emotional, nerve-racking journeys. The first shows the families cold and desperate journey through Moscow and then onto Europe, travelling by hiding in car boots, lowering themselves into the back of a lorry to hide from police and almost suffocating crammed inside a shipping container, without food or drink, however, these are only a small part of the family’s history. Their journey depicts how much they rely on the kindness of strangers, but we also see how so much cruelty while travelling to the UK leaves Hamed mistrustful of others.

The second path they take is through Hassam, Hamed and Hussein’s determination to succeed, once they settle in Cardiff, it also takes us on Hussein’s journey with the healthcare system for the treatment he so desperately needs. The wonderful vocals of Afghan singer Elaha Soroor, drifts on and off the stage throughout the play, observing the family’s’ heartache alongside the audience but also lending her haunting vocals, like death, to accompany the beat of Hussein’s heart, his fight for life and his struggle to breathe. Despite having been through the toughest times one can imagine, Hussein Amiri’s hope and positivity shines so bright and seems to have no ends.

The actors are so skilled at pulling you into every situation they encounter, drawing you into their love for one another and the pain they endure. This story is a moving and absorbing memoir, it is a very emotional love letter to the NHS. It oozes hope, courage and a love for life, it tells the story of how many lives a person can touch in just a short time and deserves to be shown to a very, very wide audience.