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Times
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Noughts & Crosses review — star-crossed lovers shine amid the gloom
School parties may well be out in force, taking notes in the restful surroundings of Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, but I'm not sure many adults will enjoy this heavy-handed version of Malorie Blackman's dystopian novel about a Britain where downtrodden white people are kept in their place by a contemptuous black elite. Dominic Cooke's adaptation — first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company two decades ago — constantly strikes a moralising note, while Tinuke Craig's lacklustre production rushes through scene after scene, leaving us to try to make sense of a collection of remorselessly one-dimensional characters. The white underdogs suffer their fate like grim-faced extras from EastEnders; the black rulers resemble the smug, feckless cast of a Jilly Cooper novel. Corinna Brown and Noah Valentine at least bring youthful vitality to the roles of the star-crossed lovers Sephy and Callum, and you can have a certain amount of fun spotting the occasional parallels with Romeo and Juliet. But there's an awful lot of shouting of pedestrian dialogue as the duo try to pursue their romantic dreams and an IRA-style bombing campaign nudges the Establishment into taking brutal counter-measures. When a shopping centre is blown up by members of the Liberation Militia, the government resorts to the hangman. The hectoring mood is depressingly reminiscent of Regent's Park's attempt in 2022 to turn Antigone into a sloganeering 21st-century parable about populism and Islamic extremists. A bleak storyline is complemented by unalluring visuals. The designer, Colin Richmond, has created a grim backdrop of rusting steel corridors, columns and ladders; his costume palette is dominated by muted greys and blues. Scenes of violence add routine touches of slow-motion choreography. Actors hover, chorus-like, in the gallery, silently looking on as the lovers confront their fate. As for the racial hierarchy, it's depicted in unabashedly simplistic terms, evoking a world somewhere between Jim Crow America and Apartheid South Africa. Habib Nasib Nader makes the most of the underwritten role of Sephy's father, who just happens to be the deputy prime minister.
Times
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Noughts & Crosses review — this heavy-handed adaptation is not for adults
School parties may well be out in force, taking notes in the restful surroundings of Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, but I'm not sure many adults will enjoy this heavy-handed version of Malorie Blackman's dystopian novel about a Britain where downtrodden white people are kept in their place by a contemptuous black elite. Dominic Cooke's adaptation — first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company two decades ago — constantly strikes a moralising note, while Tinuke Craig's lacklustre production rushes through scene after scene, leaving us to try to make sense of a collection of remorselessly one-dimensional characters. The white underdogs suffer their fate like grim-faced extras from EastEnders; the black rulers resemble the smug, feckless cast of a Jilly Cooper novel. • Read more theatre reviews, guides and interviews Corinna Brown and Noah Valentine at least bring youthful vitality to the roles of the star-crossed lovers Sephy and Callum, and you can have a certain amount of fun spotting the occasional parallels with Romeo and Juliet. But there's an awful lot of shouting of pedestrian dialogue as the duo try to pursue their romantic dreams and an IRA-style bombing campaign nudges the Establishment into taking brutal counter-measures. When a shopping centre is blown up by members of the Liberation Militia, the government resorts to the hangman. The hectoring mood is depressingly reminiscent of Regent's Park's attempt in 2022 to turn Antigone into a sloganeering 21st-century parable about populism and Islamic extremists. A bleak storyline is complemented by unalluring visuals. The designer, Colin Richmond, has created a grim backdrop of rusting steel corridors, columns and ladders; his costume palette is dominated by muted greys and blues. Scenes of violence add routine touches of slow-motion choreography. Actors hover, chorus-like, in the gallery, silently looking on as the lovers confront their fate. As for the racial hierarchy, it's depicted in unabashedly simplistic terms, evoking a world somewhere between Jim Crow America and Apartheid South Africa. Habib Nasib Nader makes the most of the underwritten role of Sephy's father, who just happens to be the deputy prime minister. Amanda Bright plays the heroine's mother, who is more interested in reaching for another glass of chablis than caring for her children. As ever at Regent's Park in the evening, the dimming of the light supplies extra atmosphere, but the second half of the play still seems oddly convoluted.★★☆☆☆ 150min Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, London, to Jul 26, Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
Telegraph
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Noughts and Crosses: Like being battered over the head with a strobe light
First published in 2001, Noughts and Crosses, Malorie Blackman's racially-charged take on Romeo and Juliet, pulls no punches in depicting the devastating impact of racism. Nearly a quarter of a century on, its audacious imagining of a world divided into a black ruling class (Crosses) and a white persecuted underclass (Noughts) still has an eye-opening frisson. Yet, it comes a cropper in Tinuke Craig 's frenetic, over-emphatic revival of Dominic Cooke 's 2007 stage adaptation, which is more interested in making sure we understand the importance of its message than in making us care about the characters. It's like being battered over the head with a strobe light. The action takes place against Colin Richmond 's urban hellhole of a set, on whose concrete stairs and rusting balconies members of the cast hover throughout like ominous shadows. Here Sephy, the energetic 14-year-old daughter of the deputy prime minister Kamal (a Cross) and Callum, the rougher edged son of her family's former housekeeper (a Nought), tentatively pursue a clandestine relationship, snatching moments on the beach and, when they can, exchanging private notes. But their relationship is imperilled when Callum's father and brother become involved in a paramilitary terrorist organisation. Blackman's depiction of state-mandated segregation is much more pertinent to previous situations in South Africa and Northern Ireland than to the UK, a country tainted by a more invidious, slippery form of racism. But it does ram home the link between oppression and radicalisation and the pernicious impact of divided loyalties on family dynamics. Yet Craig's curiously context-free production gives precious little sense of how class and division actually operate. It doesn't help that the dialogue is often ham-fisted: 'Noughts are people just like us,' declares Sephy to her detached, wine-swigging mother, a cardboard cut-out of a depressed politician's wife. But Craig repeatedly ups the ante at the expense of specificity. No one talks when they can shout instead. Callum's mother Meggie (Kate Kordel), put through the wringer by a plot that never lets up, spends most of the time either screaming or wailing. Most of the supporting characters are poorly sketched, including Kamal, who doesn't so much radiate menace or implacable power as greasy, underwhelming ineptitude. More confusingly, there is often a disconnect between character reactions and the actual plot, which makes such great leaps in time and logic that the audience finds itself struggling to keep up. This matters in a story that ambitiously posits Callum as an adolescent boy dangerously split between vengeful fury and giddy teenage love. Noah Valentine plays him with a beguiling mix of innocence and truculence but he struggles in a hectic storyline that at times borders on incoherence. And although Corinna Brown gives Sephy a vivacious stage presence, she can't find the weight required to give her relationship with Callum the emotional heft it needs. The more Craig goes for shock and awe, the more she leaves you exhausted and bored. Not a great combination.
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Noughts & Crosses review – Malorie Blackman's thought experiment confronts the audience anew
'Do you ever wonder what it would be like if our positions were reversed?' Callum asks his prison guard. 'If we whites were in charge instead of you Crosses?' Malorie Blackman's seminal 2001 novel flipped racism on its head. Bringing the story for young adults to life on stage, Tinuke Craig's zippy, large-scale production confronts the audience anew. This modern Romeo and Juliet remains one of the most striking tales written for teenagers. The production is well suited for schools, giving young people the language and imagery to talk about racism here and now. But adapted by Dominic Cooke in 2007 for the RSC, the choppy script favours faithfulness to the book over inventiveness in exploring its new form. The cast bursts with sometimes overstated energy. In Blackman's thought experiment, white people are Noughts, like Callum (Noah Valentine), downtrodden and degraded. Black people are Crosses, like Sephy (Corinna Brown). Crosses hold the power. This is a world where schools are segregated, juries are all-Cross and plasters are by default dark brown. Starting out in their mid-teens, open-hearted best friends Callum and Sephy are forced to grow up fast as they wade through the crushing racial and class structures that pin them in their opposing places. Brown is buoyant as Sephy, desperate to do the right thing, her eyes slowly opening to her own privilege. Valentine is eager and angry as Callum, hardening fast at the harshness of the world picking his family apart. As in the novel, the play tears through the busy plot. While the story squares up to suicide, sex and capital punishment, each moment is sped through to get to the next. Though Craig's direction is punchy and clear, the emotional impact frequently feels pushed aside in order to move on to the next scene. Cooke's excessive use of direct address repeatedly tells us everything we need to know, rather than letting us work anything out for ourselves. The fights, chases and continual narrative lurches means time whizzes by, racing towards the play's harrowing end, where grief bursts across the stage. More than two decades on, Blackman's story of forbidden love and constant injustice remains damningly relevant, holding a cracked mirror up to its audience. A guttural cry pierces the night sky. Loss follows loss, and only anger remains. At Regent's Park Open Air theatre until 26 July
The Guardian
05-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
The Almeida theatre has a coup in Dominic Cooke: this gifted director is also a proven talent spotter
Dominic Cooke is an inspired choice to succeed Rupert Goold at the Almeida. He is a proven hand at directing new plays, classics and musicals. He is a very good producer who appears to rejoice in the success of his colleagues. And, at a time when the vogue is for 'reimagined' versions of old plays, he is that rare figure: one who respects an author's intentions while remaining open to new ideas. At 59 he also has an extensive list of credits without being, in words once fatuously applied to the BBC's former head of Radio 3, John Drummond, 'tainted by experience'. As artistic director of London's Royal Court from 2006 to 2013, Cooke showed exceptional judgment. I well remember an opening press conference where he said one of his aims was to stage plays about the aspirational middle classes. He was as good as his word with productions of Bruce Norris's The Pain and the Itch and Clybourne Park which satirised, respectively, phoney white liberalism and bourgeois property fetishism. But Cooke also championed a whole school of then unknown young writers including Bola Agbaje, Anya Reiss, Polly Stenham, Penelope Skinner and Mike Bartlett. And it was during his tenure that the Royal Court staged Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem now widely regarded as the best new play of the current century. While promoting new work Cooke has also shown his skill at directing the classics, ancient and modern. I very much admired his pairing of The Winter's Tale and Pericles for the RSC in 2006 in joint promenade productions. What he brought home with unusual clarity was the idea that Shakespeare's late plays are quasi-religious experiences underpinned by resurrection myths: in a single day we saw Kate Fleetwood miraculously restored to life first as the secluded Hermione and then as the coffined Thaisa. His production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible reminded us of the danger of unyielding intellectual rigidity and his current West End version of Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession sensibly trims the text to highlight Shaw's vehemently anti-capitalist message: it also reminds us in the play's climactic mother-daughter showdown that, in a good play, everyone is right. Imelda Staunton plays Mrs Warren and she has been a feature of Cooke's two most successful ventures into musicals. In his outstanding 2017 National Theatre production of Follies he not only brought out Stephen Sondheim's fascination with duality: he showed us how every character was haunted by his or her past. When Staunton's Sally sang In Buddy's Eyes you saw a woman filled with a deluded belief in her life-partner's ardour: by the time she sang Losing My Mind the same woman was a lovelorn wreck on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Cooke's recent London Palladium production of Hello Dolly! also breathed new life into a Broadway standard: Staunton sang the title song not in the usual style of a superannuated showbiz legend but in that of a cheery little soul renewing her acquaintance with the beloved haunt, and the waiters, of her youth. Cooke has worked profitably in other media. His TV production of Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy and Richard III was excellent and his two feature films, On Chesil Beach and The Courier, both had great style. But his domain is the theatre and he will be judged at the Almeida by his ability to combine a sensitivity to the present with a respect for the past. There is every reason to hope he will not only be as good as Goold but will forge his own style.
