Noughts & Crosses at Rose Theatre

I like what Rose Theatre are doing at the moment. After several years of going for established plays with safe productions and often a famous actor, with mixed results, the programme is more unusual and more interesting.

Noughts & Crosses was an example of this. I understood it had been on TV but that was all I knew before booking it. As usual I went for a seat in row J and J41 cost a modest £25 thanks to a significant Senior Citizen Concession.

I may have made a mistake in picking a matinee performance, expecting only retired people to be there, as the place was full with several large groups of school children, we even had to wait a few minutes for one group to arrive and pile into the Circle.

 

Noughts & Crosses was, as the name suggests an Us and Them story with a forbidden love across the divide. While that obviously has strong echoes of Romeo and Juliet here the emphasis was more on the divide than on the love.

The Crosses (elite) were cast as black and the Noughts (oppressed) as white though I am so used to colour-blind casting that I took this as a co-incidence at first and though more of the obvious class divide between the two groups.

The story was very political, which is why I assume the school children were there, and we shared time with militant freedom fighters (or terrorists, depending on your viewpoint) and with the authoritarian (or  people's protector) Home Secretary.

There was a lot going on within the play with politics at the macro level, a love affair at the micro level and family dynamics somewhere in the middle.

Sadly the school children were mostly interested in the love story and there were distracting shrieks when they kissed. Luckily there was not too much of this and the while the school children fidgeted and whispered they never quite became annoying.

The production was nicely done with constant set changes executed smoothly, several of the cast playing more than one role, news stories shown on TVs, and the two families in two places on stage at the same time. It all worked rather neatly.

The ending was a little corny but it worked in that it did not end the story but left plenty of room for discussion on what could happen next, something for all those school children to get their teeth into.

Noughts & Crosses was very satisfying theatre.