Walk Hard - Talk Loud

Synopsis

For the Kahn family, the Promise Land is neither the Jerusalem of their forebears, nor the East End flat they live in now. They are part of a vibrant community whose dream of a better world is put to an exhilarating test in the anti-fascist riots of the 1930s. Share in their lives across three decades, as a mother's resilience contends with a father's weakness and a family faces the challenges of history.

Our Review:

29 November 2005

In the past few years, you could be forgiven for thinking `black theatre' had burst onto the scene as a sudden, overnight thing. But a quick look at Nick Kent's Tricycle's programme for Walk Hard - Talk Loud reminds us that even just at this theatre, its roots go further back, both with black British, African writers and those from over the pond. Their first African-American play was in fact Lorraine Hansbury's A Raisin in the Sun, in 1985. Elsewhere, British black actors had been hard at it, trying to gain a foothold from even earlier. By the '70s, the RSC were instituting their first cross-cultural companies.

Kent, famous for his political docu-dramas, is doing something remarkably similar here in creating a multicultural company for a season of plays covering 100 years of Afro-Caribbean experiences. The strengths of such a policy are plain to see in this inaugural production by the pioneering Afro-American writer and director, Abram Hill. Wr...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

No reviews yet

Click here to add your review