Verbatim Theatre and Physical Theatre don’t seem, on the face of it, to be complementary genres.
But this piece, conceived by Lloyd Newson and performed by physical theatre company DV8, tries to combine the two, around the tricky subject of Islamic extremism, Islamophobia, multiculturalism, censorship, freedom of speech and hate crimes.
It sort-of worked, in that it got me and Janie talking about those subjects afterwards, but it didn’t really work for us, in itself, as a piece talking about those tricky subjects.
In truth, verbatim theatre about such tricky subjects would need more words and less dance.
I think the critics pretty much concurred with our view – here is a link to a search term for the reviews.
The vid link below gives you a reasonable idea of what this production looked and sounded like: