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.
