slow fade

I’ve been a fan of the PappyShow since early 2019, watching a euphoric performance of Boys at the Brighton Festival. I’d long heard good things about the company – the joyfulness of their work, their spirit of collectivity – but Boys exceeded all anticipation. The show was a laugh-and-cry delight, exuberant, heartfelt and direct, that felt from the audience like being in friendly company with the performers, all young men of Black and Asian backgrounds. I was there to host a Theatre Club at the invitation of Brighton People’s Theatre , who had group tickets and wanted a supported space in which to chat afterwards: most of what I remember about that conversation is a constant stream of marvel, at the skill of the performers and their openness in thinking about public perceptions and expectations of masculinity, black masculinity in particular, and their actual experiences, feelings, dreams. Fast forward to early 2023: the PappyShow and I are connected again as part of the Moving R

In the middle of her zine/audio play/essay/memoir Heart-Space Astronaut , writer Emma Adams recalls a play she wrote in 2010 about climate breakdown and capitalism, a play she intended as ‘a howl of a warning’ that ‘would make people care, stop, think, change’. Except, she writes, it didn’t. Her work was as ineffective at solving climate change as all those dreadful plays featuring polar bears that plagued theatre in the early 2010s, as ineffective as ‘the many scientific reports written about it. The kids striking about it. The many UN declarations demanding action about it.’ Heart-Space Astronaut is one of a number of works made by the Dissonant Futures Collective, eight multidisciplinary artists exploring together what might emerge from climate grief, a feeling lodged in my bones more or less since my second child was born (both of them are teenagers now). It was exactly what I needed in the days after seeing Katie Mitchell’s production A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction