Theatre reviews: The Trials | A Grain Of Sand
Set in a near-future world beset by climate crisis, The Trials tells the story of members of a furious younger generation, given the power to judge older people who have lived comfortable, carbon-hungry lives, writes Joyce McMillan
The Trials, Tron Theatre, Glasgow ★★★★
A Grain Of Sand, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★
The Trials is a youth theatre show with a difference; and one that inevitably raises questions about what the angry young people on stage would make of the characters in some of the more inward-looking musical theatre productions of our times.
Dawn King’s 2022 play imagines a near-future world beset by climate crisis, where a furious younger generation has been given the power to judge and condemn all those older people who lived comfortable carbon-hungry lives, before the collapse of the old economic system.
In Joanna Bowman’s impressive Tron production, the three adults on trial are brilliantly played by Brian Ferguson, Maryam Hamidi and Pauline Goldsmith, as a range of all-too-recognisable ordinary middle-class types. And the debates on their fate are intense, furious and revealing; in a show that offers a superb introduction, for the Tron’s gifted young company, to the business of making theatre that matters, and confronts the big unspoken questions of our time.
Meanwhile, A Grain Of Sand by writer-director Elias Matar, briefly in Scotland this week, also speaks for a generation of children catastrophically failed by the adult world. Its solo narrator, Renad, is an 11 year old girl wandering devastated Gaza alone, after the loss of her entire family in an Israeli bombing attack; she is sustained only by her lost grandmother’s beautiful Palestinian folk tales of survival and renewal.
As the show’s powerful video elements make clear, many of the words spoken by performer and co-creator Sarah Agha are direct quotes from Palestinian children caught up in the devastation. And if the show is theatrically direct and simple, with a clear agitprop element, Renad’s story is one that we should never cease telling; until compassion and justice finally prevail over the horrific cruelty and violence she describes, with the heartbreaking clarity of a child.
The Trials at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, until 14 March. A Grain Of Sand is now at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, until 14 March.
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