Hotshows

A guide to the best shows at the Festival by The Scotsman’s top team of reviewers

are almost wholly white. “The other thing I notice, even though we have more people of colour shows here than maybe four years ago, we don’t have that many black audience members, because they can’t afford to come,” says Robinson.

Natasha Marshall, who has written and performed the uplifting Half Breed, at Assembly, about a mixed-raced young woman from a West Country village as she prepares to audition for a London theatre school, has just managed to cross those hurdles. To write her piece, she moved back in with her granny in Bristol at the age of 26, to save rent, working at Sainsbury’s to make enough to live on.

“I need my voice to get heard, and I know that people need to hear this, that racism, borderline racism does still exist,” she says. “This is a story about being mixed race, but it’s also about surviving, and that’s what I didn’t anticipate. When I’m on stage performing I am fighting for my life, I feel like I am in a bloody boxing match, I’m fighting to show the audience I do deserve to be here, and the story does hold weight and does hold value.”

In the Main Hall at Summerhall esteemed Scottish director Graham Eatough is, presciently, perhaps, exploring similar territory, in his play How to Act, his first return to the Scottish stage in ten years. In it a veteran white theatre director, Robert, is giving an acting masterclass to a Nigerian-born student, Promise. In this post-colonial fable, the tables are turned, in a piece critic Joyce Mcmillan calls “a disturbing study of power and its abuses in the arts and beyond”. The show has been a sell-out.

Other notable shows this year include Salt, also at Summerhall, about a young black woman’s journey back to her Ghanaian roots: Yvette, at the Pleasance, about a 13-year-old growing up in Neasden; Mixed Brain, at Summerhall; Quarter Life Crisis, at Underbelly, about a Nigerian Briton, Alicia, growing up in London; and Bone Woman,by American storyteller Imani G Alexander, at Greenside Infirmary Street. Women of colour, and power, are championed in shows as diverse as the brash, popular Hot Brown Honey, and the actor and comedian Desiree Burch’s Unf*ckable, which by all accounts is not for the faint-hearted. Assembly Hall JJJJ Summerhall JJJJ