Dirty Reality Review summaries by Grace Holliday

Dirty Reality II- Black Mime Theatre Company. Article review by Grace Holliday.

Dirty Reality II is a performance on interracial marriages and mixed race children created through these cross-racial relationships, and ‘About having pride and embracing it no matter how diluted the skin tone’

The newspaper reports we were given were about Black Mime Theatre’s production of ‘Dirty Reality 2’, the follow up to ‘Dirty Reality 1’. Performed in 1996 in Nottingham, the company spent five months researching around the main theme of interracial marriage and the effect that this has on both the adults and the subsequently mixed race children. The performance consists of a range of different locations for the action to happen within, and these are extremely varied; from a slave ship to teenage discos. The cast transform into the necessary characters with these changes; these 5 members, of both genders, were ; Mojisola Adebayo, Marva Alexander, Ekundayo, Stuart Pampellone and Lise Stuart. Expression of these themes and aspects of interracial marriage is through dance and movement, a cappela song and recorded voices, as well as, of course, mime.

Praise and criticism of Dirty Reality II were varied, and different critics picked up a variety of different viewpoints. Emotions evoked through the performance were mixed; the ‘Sunday Telegraph’ felt the ‘pain’ and ‘injustice’ of the performance, whilst the ‘Independent on Sunday’ professed to feeling the ‘anger and confusion’ that the piece induced. Another article claimed to find the piece ‘utterly hypnotic’, however a criticism that seemed to occur in more than one article was that the story line was not developed enough, and therefore emotions could only be felt to a limited level. Similarly, the ‘Independent on Sunday’ criticised the lack of actual ‘dirty reality’ in the piece; perhaps this is claiming that it doesn’t go deep enough into the issues it is portraying, or perhaps it is claiming that the real issues are not exposed enough. Either way, I think this links to a previous discussion we had in a seminar about audience accessibility; I think that in order to put across their messages, BMT had to limit the dirty reality to some extent; whilst these performances were meant to relate to the audience, genuine reality over kill may have resulted in alienation and a lack of understanding from audience members, thereby meaning that the company had not totally fulfilled their aim of putting a coherent message out there.

In terms of relations and equality to both black and white characters and audience members, the general consensus among the articles is that this is done justly; one article goes as far as to say that Director Denise Wong ‘can’t be faulted’ for her ‘artistic political correctness’. Prejudice origination from and directed at both sides is explored, whilst the potential for love across colours is shown to be an acceptable occurrence.

Despite the barriers the performance revealed and explored, I hope that audience members who saw it being promoted as viable on stage were influenced to see it as acceptable in everyday life. I also hope that audience members were able to sympathise, if not empathise, with the troubles faced by both adults and children in the piece, whatever their colour, thereby increasing audience understanding of this specific issue, and in turn reducing prejudice towards people of opposite or mixed colour.

Grace Holliday