“I’m a second generation immigrant, the generation that makes it or breaks it”
In its opening quarter, Stephen Laughton’s Screens manages to be that rare thing indeed, a play that actually comes close to capturing the way in which technology has utterly transformed both our everyday behaviour and interpersonal relationships. Georgia Lowe’s smartly spare design allows for Richard Williamson and Dan English’s projections to take us through Al’s faltering first steps into gay online dating on Grindr, Ayşe’s hashtag-heavy documentation of her teenage strife on Instagram and crucially, a peek into their mother Emine’s inbox on her brand-new smartphone
It’s an ingenious route into the lives, both online and off, of this British Turkish Cypriot family living in Harlow but we soon come to see that Laughton’s scope is wider, much wider, than this, as he folds in issues of the immigrant experience, splintered cultural identity, homophobia, post-Brexit racial antagonism and much more besides. Thus Screens becomes a highly ambitious piece of writing about the difficulties in finding your self when personal and political circumstances are in such flux. Continue reading “Review: Screens, Theatre503”
