Theatre review: This Heaven

Once again the Finborough Theatre takes us to Australia, which in Nakkiah Lui's This Heaven is shown up as very much backward where civil rights are concerned, at least for the indigenous people. A few years before the play's start, an Aboriginal man died in police custody. A number of legal battles later and the police are let off with a fine, while his family are left feeling abandoned. His widow Joan (Elizabeth Uter) feels particularly betrayed as she actually worked at the police station for 17 years as their Aboriginal Liaison Officer, a role she's now being quietly shunted out of. But for her children Sissy (Nicôle Lecky) and Ducky (Bevan Celestine) their main reaction is anger. Although they have a sympathetic lawyer in James (Timothy Knightley,) he now advises that they've reached the end of what they can do through the courts.

Theatre review: I Wish To Die Singing

Finborough boss Neil McPherson takes a break from reading new and forgotten plays to put one of his own together, a verbatim play about events in 1915 and later. I Wish To Die Singing - Voices from the Armenian Genocide mixes the history of Turkey during the First World War (the show is part of the occasional THEGREATWAR100 series) with the accounts of those who survived a massacre that inspired the very term "genocide" to be invented and officially defined. With Turkey having sided with Germany in the war and suffering a major defeat, a scapegoat was sought. The Christian Armenians, long the business leaders in the Ottoman Empire and resented for it, made for an easy and popular target, and brutal "cleansing" was ordered. The fact that this genocide was largely forgotten or denied within a couple of decades is quoted as a reason Hitler felt encouraged to follow a similar course of action with the Jews.