Stage-to-screen review: Lights Up - Half Breed

Staged by Talawa at Soho Theatre in 2017, Half Breed returns there for its TV incarnation for the Lights Up season, and in something that still weirdly seems to set off more nostalgia for me than seeing the auditorium itself*, it opens with writer-performer Natasha Marshall entering the empty building and steeling herself with a drink from the bar. Inspired by her own experience growing up mixed-race in the Westcountry, Marshall's alter-ego for the play is 17-year-old Jazmin, the only person in the mostly-white village to be even partly black (although there are people of South and East Asian descent, who mainly seem to run takeaways and have to put up with casual racism from their customers.) Jazmin feels as if her personality matches her racial identity, never feeling quite one thing or the other, always sitting on the fence. She does, though, know that she doesn't want to stay there forever, and despite not being convinced she "gets" Shakespeare has been practising a monologue for a drama school audition.

Both her parents having left when she was young, Jazmin has been raised by her grandmother, whose deteriorating health is at the background of the monologue throughout; the other major person in her life is best friend Brogan, whose ambitions don't stray much further than motherhood and never leaving the village.

The catalyst for the story is Brogan's thuggish new boyfriend, and Jazmin is forced to reevaluate the way she quietly sits back and takes his racism. Half Breed was developed out of a poem, and is still told in rhyme: Not my favourite thing, because it can lead to a slightly monotonous performance, as we get here; ironically Marshall carries the rhyming couplets more naturally when playing other characters than the narrator. And despite Marshall's intentions that her story can embrace all minorities persecuted in places like Jazmin's village, it does also build to a trope I really hoped we might be seeing the back of by now. But there are definite high points in the narrative as well, and the angle is a fresh one - in all the theatre that deals with race in this country, the particular dynamic in the mostly-white South West definitely feels rarely explored. I also liked the way Ruby Spencer Pugh's design brought the rocks that symbolise Jazmin and Brogan's friendship dynamically into the set, while director Miranda Cromwell uses camera angles that take in the empty auditorium to expand on her original stage production, making it feel like an organic transition to the screen.

Half Breed by Natasha Marshall is streaming until April 2022 on BBC iPlayer as part of the Lights Up season.

Running time: 1 hour.

Photo credit: Helen Maybanks.

*I think it's probably because, in most theatres, once the lights go down the experience is unique to whatever show you're watching at the time; whereas the local area and the venue's front-of-house remain the same, so they're part of multiple memories. This doesn't hold true for places where the architecture of the auditorium is visible throughout and part of the experience, like the Globe and RSC's stages; hence watching shows filmed there kick off more nostalgia than shows filmed behind dark proscenium arches.