Actor and writer Zawe Ashton was recently seen in London & Broadway playing opposite Tom Hiddleston in Betrayal. But expect something very different from this play with its distinctively different title about the lasting effect of colonialism on women of colour. It is good to see Hackney Showroom, who produced Travis Alabanza’s Burgerz, staging radical new theatre again and giving a home to this poetic examination of the structures that keep racism in place and affect women of colour every day.
Lately, it’s small things. Pop songs. The radio. Every day anguish, becomes madness. Call on your family. Call on the ancestors. Can they guide you home? “we are pearl and earth and root we know ourselves to be natural and complete carved from rock that floats but we should still be careful what we wish for some of us can sink in the upstream” for all the women who thought they were Mad is an urgent piece of theatre examining the miriad of forces that collide and conspire against women of colour living in contemporary Britain today. Zawe Ashton is a novelist, poet, playwright, filmmaker and actor. She most recently starred on stage in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal alongside Tom Hiddleston and in the film Velvet Buzzsaw alongside Jake Gyllenhaal. Her first novel Character Breakdown was published this year. Age Recommendation: 14+ LOCATION: Stoke Newington Town Hall Stoke Newington Church Street N16 0JR