642 posts
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Post by Stasia on Jan 16, 2020 8:28:25 GMT
And there's one woman putting it all into perspective. Giving the play itself more thought, in light of the Markle debacle mostly, I did wonder if part of the reason the play didn't work so well in the UK is that we tend to put class above race? Racism of course exists as it does in the USA, but over here, we temper it with classism as well. If you fight up to the next class level, you find a different kind of racism is insulated slightly by acceptance? Just a thought I'm putting out there - a middle class black family in the USA is given different social status to one in the UK, as in, we don't have areas that can be described as "middle class black" as the do, but we do have "working class immigrant" ones, as it were. Probably a play there, come to think of it. Of course I can't judge the situation in UK from the inside but I think you're right in saying that UK has more "class" than "race"-related triggering situations.
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642 posts
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Post by Stasia on Jan 16, 2020 8:44:30 GMT
This play is about racism. Russians are not a race. What Stasia describes so powerfully in her post is xenophobia, which while based on the same ignorance and prejudice is a different thing. You can hide your nationality, you can't hide your skin colour. Women and people of colour will always cop the worst of it. You may hide your nationality, but you can't hide your name, your passport, your accent and lots of other things. So I personally think these are the same situations, not the different one. As the one being discriminated on the base where I was born and facing prejudice when in the UK on the base of being "foreign", I think it is very similar to what people with different skin colour may be facing. But neither them not me can't stand in each others shoes so we can't measure who is more discriminated and less privileged. And speaking of "fair view", when the play started, I thought how lucky and privileged the black family is... I find the play valuable in terms of raising important questions and making you think and discuss. But I didn't feel the way these thoughts were put into the words impeccably. This ending could have been much more powerful while staying unsettling. For me it was more as a draft as a finalised Pulitzer-winning text.
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Post by londonpostie on Jan 16, 2020 8:56:13 GMT
Fwiw, and statistically speaking, in sunny south London everyone is a minority - I would probably say the issue is discrimination/opportunity rather than racism because the issues are broader than skin colour. Example:
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Post by asfound on Jan 18, 2020 13:10:41 GMT
Er... Have any people of colour on here seen this. I am going on Saturday and the spoilers for the end sound very intriguing. As a light skinned person of colour it all sounds like it will create havoc and judgement. I'm going next week - I wasn't planning to initially as normally I can't stand these on-the-nose "issues" plays but it sounded interesting enough and I liked Slave Play so I thought why not? Just skimming over the comments here I sincerely hope I'm not going to have to participate...
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562 posts
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Post by jadnoop on Jan 18, 2020 16:18:52 GMT
Hmm. This one really tested my patience. The opening, bizarre parody of 80s/90s sitcoms was awkward, but had the potential to set up something really interesting. However, at the end of the day, the message seemed disappointingly superficial and delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
As someone who’s mixed race and with parents with very different backgrounds (Asian and South American parents), the questions of identity, culture, stories, and who we are, and so on are particularly interesting and important topics to me. And yet this really didn’t feel like it had anything new or interesting to say.
And in terms of the approach, the various meta moments had the energy, but none of the exhilarating power of recent plays like When We Have Tortured Each Other Sufficiently, The Watsons, or the magnificent An Octoroon.
Two stars for me.
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Post by asfound on Jan 23, 2020 16:44:15 GMT
Yikes, found that genuinely painful to sit through. At the end, looking around the audience and at all the brightly lit white people on stage I had a definite Mitchell & Webb "are we the bad guys" moment.
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