Rebecca Omogbehin (Jemima (House) & Oni (Amongst The Reeds)),
Jan Le (Gillian (Amongst The Reeds))
London based company Clean Break was founded in 1979 by two women prisoners with urgent stories that they wanted to be heard through theatre. They have brought two plays to this year’s Fringe that could be standalone but are presented as a 90-minute Double Bill with the common theme of women from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds (BAME) being criminalised. Their production follows research through interaction with a Refugee and Asylum Seeking group, and two emerging writers from have the written plays that explore these situations.
House takes place in a cosy domestic setting, where pictures of Jesus hang with family snaps as though he was one of them. Pat (Shvorne Marks) at the invitation of her sister Jem (Rebecca Omogbehin) returns to her family home for her Nigerian Mother’s (Michelle Greenidge) birthday. What follows after initial sisterly warmth is a re-opening of old family wounds; a resurrection of hurt, grief and hypocrisy that is brought to light thanks to the strong interaction among this all black female cast breathing life into the fine poetic text from Somalia Seaton.
The performances from these three, that simply ooze with life and power, can’t be praised enough. Eating real food onstage may be a bit questionable theatrically, but Michelle Greenidge’s body language and use of her cutlery to show her discomfort at the atmosphere when eating what may be her family’s last supper, was perfectly captured. Blind eyes may have been turned to the dark deeds involving their late father who dies blameless while his pregnant daughter goes punished, but there is light and redemption at the end as Pat ‘finds her wings’.
In Chino Odimba’s Amongst The Reeds , it is again the actions of an older man against a vulnerable teenager, in this case a not-so-benign ‘uncle’, that results in Vietnamese Gillian (Jan Le) being pregnant and living illegally in the UK. Fantasist Oni (Rebecca Omogbehin), herself an illegal teenage immigrant, takes her under her wing and they live in secret squalor in a disused building where they live out of tins, terrified of being seen. The big chequered plastic bags that are the luggage of the poorest and homeless act as the set where the desperation and the writhing birth pains are almost palpable thanks to Le’s utterly credible performance.
This second part of Clean Break’s double bill, that holds echoes of the story of Moses being found among reeds, is less structured but holds a message that’s no less powerful of survival methods of the lost, betrayed and abandoned in society.
Women are at the heart of Clean Break’s work, and strong female voices telling females’ stories that might otherwise be forgotten can only be saluted when they are performed with such conviction as these two impressive pieces of new writing.
4- 27 August at 12 noon age recommend 12+