Mad Blud @ The Theatre Royal Stratford East - A Review

Last night I was down at the Theatre Royal Stratford East to see a performance of Mad Blud, the play about knife crime, which has a 10 day run at the theatre.

Created by Philip Osment, the play is now in its third incarnation having been refined over several years of performances at the theatre. I have to say that last night was a very different theatre-going experience, which started in rather a strange fashion – we were directed away from the auditorium towards the rear of the theatre when we arrived and walked inside to discover that both audience and cast were actually behind the fire curtain and on the stage itself. Several levels of raked seating had been set up along the sides of the stage while the cast occupied a central area covered in astro-turf. Occupying two seats on the front row, we could have reached out and actually touched the actors who were only a foot or two away.

The play itself was very challenging – Mad Blud deliberately sets out to give the audience a visceral understanding of the impact of knife crime on both the perpetrators and their victims. Rather than learning scripts, each member of the cast wore an ear piece and was fed the actual voices of people directly affected – mothers, sisters and even the murderers themselves talking about their personal experiences, which they then repeated verbatim. It made for extremely uncomfortable listening at times – one particular scene involved a mother laying flowers at her child’s grave which brought tears to the eyes. There was a rather sweet attempt at levity when three of the male members of the cast donned hats and scarves and then proceeded to act out dialogue by a group of older Afro-Caribbean ladies, but that was only a momentary distraction from what was in essence a series of touching conversations about death, tragedy and loss.

At the end of the play the lights dimmed to reveal the names of all of the local kids who had been killed written on the walls in ultraviolet pen, which had tears springing to my eyes again. There was then a further 30 minute conversation between audience members, the cast and the director which revealed that there were several people in the audience who themselves had been involved in these kinds of situations. You’d have to have a heart of stone to leave the stage after the performance not feeling profoundly influenced by the experience of watching Mad Blud unfold – I took in a very deep breath of cold air and had a very stiff drink afterwards to steady myself…

Mad Blud is a real tour de force by a group of very talented young actors, and is very definitely highly recommended.