These Four Streets
February 17, 2009
The Door, Birmingham Repertory Theatre
Date reviewed: 16th February 2009
These Four Streets is an ambitious equation – six actors portray over thirty characters inhabiting four streets in a script created by six writers. It all adds up to an affectionate, but not rose-tinted, portrait of the Lozells area in Birmingham during the disturbances in October 2005.
The play’s scattered snapshots reveal the escalation of rumour and fear from scene to scene. An initial report of a fourteen-year-old girl attacked by six men becomes a girl of 12 raped by twelve, and then a gang of twenty. Parents panic over the whereabouts of their children; an otherwise law-abiding mother tries to persuade her daughter to carry a knife for protection. Significantly, her daughter chooses not to take it.
These Four Streets not only pinpoints conflict between different ethnic groups but between teenagers and adults, employers and employees, the newcomer and the already established. The action is cleverly set against the backdrop of an Internet search engine page, detailing a list of local hairdressers and a street map. A doorway, a table and a handful of chairs enable swift, slick changes as the actors nimbly negotiate a variety of settings – family homes, the office of a local councillor, a bus. The cast remain on stage throughout, providing props and bearing witness to the story unfolding before them.
Director Gwenda Hughes ratchets up the tension by keeping the simmering violence out of sight yet within earshot. Bharti Patel’s hairdresser and Elexi Walker’s would-be customer assume they’re safe behind the shutters of the African Queen Beauty Salon, until sinister footsteps suggest otherwise. Shouts and sirens resound outside Tabs Cabs, but the white radio operator agrees to brave the disturbances and help a Somali father find his daughter.
In a strong cast, Lorna Laidlaw (pictured, with Walker) is outstanding as a succession of Afro-Caribbean mothers, aunties and grandmothers. As the incessantly talkative Daisy, at first threatened by and then comforting a lost Asian girl, she gives a performance that is haughty, tender and humorously self-deluding. Daisy wields a cricket bat to protect herself, as does the Muslim hairdresser Naseem in an earlier scene; this symbol of a quintessentially English sport, vigorously adopted in places such as Pakistan and the West Indies, is here used on English soil to defend each against the other.
Thankfully, hope and decency outweigh fear and conflict in These Four Streets. The final scene points to the power of reconciliation and friendship – two elderly women, one Asian and one Afro-Caribbean, argue and fall out but, like any friends, they get over it and make up. As an exploration of community, These Four Streets is ambitious, successful and, ultimately, hopeful.
- Claire Boot
until 28th Feb
photo: Robert Day
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