"Security" by Zena Edwards
This show is a fantastic combination of theatre and spoken word. It has a short but nevertheless compelling story but what is most impressive is the acting skills and spoken word art by performer Zena Edwards.
There is some excellent staging here, with inventive use of minimal set and great use of lightining to delineate scene and character changes. The pacing isn't too bad, either as the show clocks at about an hour.
Edwards uses her singing skills and spoken word to narrate a tale in which she plays four characters, all of them distinctively embodied: there is Mahmoud an ageing Palestinian photographer; a crotchety elderly woman; Aileen, a streetwise London teenager who moonlights as a rapper, and her doomed younger brother.
It is Mahmoud who is the most poignant as it is he who lends tragic irony to the play's title "Security". Security is the one thing he cannot get in his oppressed homeland, yet in coming to London it is the one thing he is unable to find - both inside himself and in the world around him. He is so depressed he has taken to drink, and his involvement with Aileen sees him witness the death of her brother, which reminds him of his own.
It is the tragedy, and Edward's conveying of it, that makes "Security" really absorbing to watch.
"Security" runs at the Battersea Arts Centre 10-29 November 2008.
There is some excellent staging here, with inventive use of minimal set and great use of lightining to delineate scene and character changes. The pacing isn't too bad, either as the show clocks at about an hour.
Edwards uses her singing skills and spoken word to narrate a tale in which she plays four characters, all of them distinctively embodied: there is Mahmoud an ageing Palestinian photographer; a crotchety elderly woman; Aileen, a streetwise London teenager who moonlights as a rapper, and her doomed younger brother.
It is Mahmoud who is the most poignant as it is he who lends tragic irony to the play's title "Security". Security is the one thing he cannot get in his oppressed homeland, yet in coming to London it is the one thing he is unable to find - both inside himself and in the world around him. He is so depressed he has taken to drink, and his involvement with Aileen sees him witness the death of her brother, which reminds him of his own.
It is the tragedy, and Edward's conveying of it, that makes "Security" really absorbing to watch.
"Security" runs at the Battersea Arts Centre 10-29 November 2008.
