Edinburgh Fringe 2017
Half Breed
Soho Theatre and Talawa Theatre Company
Genre: Drama, Fringe Theatre, Solo Performance, Theatre
Venue: Assembly, George Square Theatre, the Box
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
As the Spice girls fade, the performance begins and we have Natasha Marshall telling a tale form Bristol to London that allows us to follow her growing up as the only mixed race kid in her town, which qualifies her as black, before she takes herself out of the intellectual ghetto through storytelling and rap that is powerful and punchy and never less than relentless in challenging prejudice through example and creative thought.
Review
Jazmin is a 17 year old with a tale to tell and a tongue worth the telling. She has grown up angry and apart but combined into a West Country community that will accept her, and if not deal with her best friend Brogan. Filled with all of the expected twists and turns of working and living in an alien environment as an alien, this has such energy and vitality at its core with Natasha Marshall taking writing and performing credits for what is a joy and an embarrassment to the liberal within us all.
Jazmin is a 17 year old with a tale to tell and a tongue worth the telling. She has grown up angry and apart but combined into a West Country community that will accept her, and if not deal with her best friend Brogan. Filled with all of the expected twists and turns of working and living in an alien environment as an alien, this has such energy and vitality at its core with Natasha Marshall taking writing and performing credits for what is a joy and an embarrassment to the liberal within us all.
We enter to a solo performer waiting to go. Once the house lights have dimmed the energy levels hit spectacular heights and Marshall takes us on a rollercoaster of a journey that sizzles and sparkles along the way. This has at its heart how to perform. There are times of comedy and joy, mixed with mild peril when Marshall has to deal with her gran’s illness. There are times when her friend Brogan, played also by Marshall, really does appear amongst us, the strength being the changes from adult to child by being childlike and not childish. This has all the hallmarks of authenticity from Marshall that makes it all the more effective and challenging.
The direction is crisp and keeps the tone moving from the tragic and visceral to the silences and gasps of the comedy and interaction between friends who shall always be friends but whose circumstances bring separate with separating expectations.
Technically the lighting understands the moods of the piece whilst the theatricality of the rocks, symbolically representing a place where the two friends would spend time with each other, drop from their strings to reveal lights, making a perfect backdrop for the piece.
This is very coherent and assured theatre making conscious of its need to sell a story by telling the story – allowing the narrative to sweep us into the performance. It makes you confront a lot of the language we don’t like but also understand why it is we should not like it.
It serves as an addition to the debate and does not represent the debate itself with a highly charged and impressive voice at its heart telling the story worth telling in a way that is very worth hearing.
