Mixed Up North
Wilton’s Music Hall
Letting in Air
Old Red Lion
Do you love theatre and hate musicals? Let me recommend the work of Robin Soans. In the past five years Soans has established himself as the most successful practitioner of verbatim theatre, plays drawn from the testimony of eyewitnesses. Where musicals aim for escapist frivolity and sometimes collapse into an extreme and debased form of falsehood, verbatim theatre remains rooted in truth and realism. In previous plays Soans has interviewed terrorists and quizzed distressed celebrities. This time he’s visited Burnley to discover the causes of the 2001 riots. The physical structure of post-industrial Burnley reinforces division. Each mill was surrounded by a tight network of streets where the workers were housed. The mills closed and the networks remained, emphasising territorial hatreds. But the energies released in 2001 were directed against authority rather than against rival tribes.
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