Latest news with #MalorieBlackman
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
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Rights on the brink for local creatives - the row over AI
Are we soon to see success for a campaign to save Brighton's most creative minds from having their designs, words and music plundered by artificial intelligence? Ministers have softened their proposals already, but doing nothing is not an option. The rise of AI has come with many challenges, but one which could have a devastating impact on the livelihoods of the many authors, filmmakers, musicians, artists, photographers, game developers, and designers who live and work in Brighton, is the systematic theft of creative works to train AI models. These models then adapt, take from and even reproduce works without any credit, payment or respect for those whose human skills it has, effectively, stolen. I am shocked that this looting has been allowed to go so fast and so far already, and I am not alone. Along with more than 50,000 others including Kate Bush, Malorie Blackman and Bjӧrn Ulvaeus, and several other MPs, I have added my name to a statement that declares this practice is: 'a major unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.' Recently, I spent time listening to creatives in Brighton who have huge concerns about the Government's approach up to now. They feel like the demands of tech giants like Meta and Open AI are having undue influence on ministers, who should instead be protecting our homegrown talent. The Government has been consulting on plans to allow tech firms to use copyrighted creative works to train their AI models without the original creator's permission. They originally expressed a preference for a voluntary 'opt-out' scheme for artists to prevent their work from being used but have now said they are looking more broadly at options. I sat down last month with a local composer leading a grassroots effort to get the Government to change course. He told me he is currently holding off on releasing his next album until he can be sure that no more of his work will be immediately stolen, and is adamantly against the opt-out proposals. It was awful to hear that this mess, with work being immediately hoovered up by tech companies, is preventing artists from delivering new work, for fear they could be ripped off. With 36 others, writing as Composers of Brighton, he sent me and other local MPs a joint letter laying out the stakes, saying: 'The government's duty is to protect the Creative Industries and to encourage ethical and responsible AI developers. Not legalising the mass theft of our nation's creative work and destroying a £126 billion a year industry that is the envy of the world.' I also met recently with a successful local author, whose work has already been swept up into these models, and who told me this is not a distant threat, but: 'actually very directly affecting our lives and livelihoods now. Every resident who has had their work stolen for a large language model to power AI is a victim of crime - myself included.' Parliament heatedly debated the issue last week. There was a lot of support for strong amendments to prevent this, which were voted down this time by the Government. However, many of my fellow MPs spoke about creative rights and against the Government's stance and. With the Lords still to finish their work and creatives there, including film director and producer Baroness Kidron, pushing for changes, there is more hope now for this campaign. Speaking at the end of the debate I said: 'Our most talented and creative minds have not been getting fair representation from the Government up to now, and this has been a very interesting, well informed and, hopefully, influential debate.' In the chamber, all the body language and comments from ministers, including Hove and Portslade MP Peter Kyle, suggested the fierce campaigning and MP pressure is really starting to hit home, and they even put in their own amendments promising to review the situation. So they are asking us to watch this space, but the current free-for-all cannot be left to fester for long. And with tech issues tied up in negotiations with Trump and the USA there is still so much uncertainty. I really hope that the final proposals from ministers will come very soon indeed, and that our local creatives find they have helped win a famous victory for one of our most important industries. Sian Berry is the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion
