Theatre review: White Pearl

I was getting occasional flashbacks to Clybourne Park in the Royal Court Downstairs as a black comedy about race goads its characters into voicing their most extreme thoughts to a mix of laughter and shocked gasps from the audience. But instead of America’s relationship with blackness it’s Asia’s relationship with whiteness that Anchuli Felicia King explores in White Pearl. Inspired by real-life advertising campaigns that went viral for the wrong reasons, Moi Tran’s set is the flashy Singapore headquarters of a comparatively new cosmetics company that’s been fast becoming a market leader in a number of countries; to reflect this, Indian founder Priya (Farzana Dua Elahe) and her Singaporean right-hand woman Sunny (Katie Leung) have made sure all the executives are women representing the different countries where their products are sold.

Theatre review: Untitled Matriarch Play (or Seven Sisters)

I know people who were hoping to skip the Royal Court's Weekly Rep season (when you're a theatre geek there's enough shows to keep up with without one venue launching a new one each week) but had to relent and book a couple of shows when they saw the quality of the ensemble. And this cast (who it's hard to believe were in their first public performance after only a week's rehearsal) are once again saving an evening that could have gone very differently in the penultimate show of the season, Untitled Matriarch Play (or Seven Sisters.) And a lot of the time Nikole Beckwith's work is as bizarre as you'd expect from a play that has an alternate title despite not having a first title. Also, there's seven women in the cast and most of their characters are related, but only four of them are sisters.

Theatre review: Pigeons

Carrie Cracknell directs the next play in the Royal Court's Weekly Rep season, Suhayla El-Bushra's disturbing, often comic Pigeons, a pretty brutal look at the fragility of relationships in a multicultural society. Played out in more or less reverse order and divided into "Shit That Went Wrong," "Shit That Went Right" and "Shit That Went Wrong (Again)" (the chapter titles spray-painted onto Chloe Lamford's now-familiar packing crate set,) it follows two teenage friends, Ashley (Ryan Sampson) and Amir (Nav Sidhu.) Ashley is the child of a pretty nasty divorce that's seen him and his sister in the custody of different parents, and his friendship with Amir, that dates back to primary school, has provided him with a second family. He often stays over, playing chess with Amir's father Hassan (Paul Bhattacharjee,) flirting with his sister Ameena (Farzana Dua Elahe) and eating his mum's samosas.