Theatre review: The Breach

In the mid 1970s in Louisville, Kentucky, a construction worker fell off scaffolding and died. Faulty equipment was to blame, but the company managed to get away with paying the family the bare minimum compensation, so by the time we meet his teenage children in 1977, they're struggling to keep their heads above water, and the younger child is being badly bullied at school. Acton (Stanley Morgan) might be small, asthmatic and awkward, making for an easy target, but he's also very smart, so soon he finds a pair of protectors: Two older boys will keep him safe if he helps them prepare for their exams. Naomi Wallace's The Breach takes place entirely in the basement of his small house, which the well-off Hoke (Alfie Jones) and his sidekick Frayne (Charlie Beck) think would make a great clubhouse for the trio. But first they need permission from Acton's older sister Jude (Shannon Tarbet.)

Theatre review: Things of Dry Hours

A white stranger forces his way into a black family’s home, but race is a secondary factor in Naomi Wallace’s look at Depression-era American politics, and an anti-Communist witch-hunt long predating the more famous one in the 1950s. Things of Dry Hours is set in Birmingham, Alabama in 1932, where factory workers are being laid off in large numbers, making the local Communist Party an attractive option, particularly to black workers who are more disenfranchised than most. One of them is Tice Hogan (Jude Akuwudike,) who takes on odd-jobs and teaches Sunday School, but mainly gets by thanks to the money his daughter Cali (Michelle Asante) makes as a washerwoman to the town’s rich. Both widowed, they live together in a tiny shack, where wanted murderer Corbin Teel (Emun Elliott) knocks on the door in the middle of one night in need of a hiding place. They have no intention of risking their lives for a suspicious stranger, but he blackmails them into letting him stay for a week.