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Time Out feature writer and reviewer Tamara Gausi offers some pointers to budding critics including how to cope with adverse reactions to your reviews.
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Read the second and final part in our series - a week in the life of a budding writer - with our short story competition winners. This time it’s runner up Mahsuda Shah.
March/April 2008
Random
Theatre: Royal Court, London
Playwright: debbie tucker green
Duration: Until 12th April 2008
Rating: 
Review by: Madhvi Ramani
Raw and rhythmic, Random is the new play by debbie tucker green. Set on a bare stage with only one actress, and condensed into a tight 50 minutes, it packs a hard punch.
The drama opens on the morning of a normal day. As we follow an ordinary black family through their everyday lives, we delight in the fact that tucker green is stepping into unusual territory for a dramatist.
She occupies the novelist’s space as she captures the passing of the minutes, the nuances of the mundane and her characters’ interior lives. And she does it with such skill that the audience remains engaged throughout. After all, who could describe cleaning up after breakfast as poetically as ‘And as her cornflake bowl/is scrape free of wet leftovers/and the dregs of the drinks/is sunk inna sink...’?
Everything feels familiar and funny: the daughter who ‘dress like iss summer/while spring still strugglin’, the mother who fusses over breakfast, the father who grunts his preference for dinner (lamb), the brother who chats the girls up on his way to school (‘yu nice – you – not y’frien’ – you’). Although there is a subtle sense of foreboding throughout the first half, nothing prepares us for the news that the brother has been fatally stabbed. It is unexpected, out of the blue - random.
The tragic event is made even more ‘random’ by the fact that his death is never explained. Why was he stabbed? Who did it? How did events unfold after we last saw him in the classroom? None of these questions are ever answered.
Instead, the play focuses on the aftermath of the stabbing. When the sister identifies the body, the brutality she sees and graphically describes makes it all seems so senseless. However, the impact that the violence of this play has on the audience is not as strong as in tucker green’s recent play Dirty Butterfly, which made members of the audience recoil in horror. Perhaps this is because Random is a warmer play, and is more a study of grief and community spirit rather than victimisation and violence.
Random is also about prejudices, and challenges our perceptions of the stabbings and shootings we read about daily in papers. Not only does it give us the personal story behind the headlines, but it directly attacks the ‘press/ pressin/the picturesque for a bite [...] Feeling brave askin a hard-lookin ‘hoodie’/what he think. Only to find / under a cloak of Adidas/is a brotha/whose eyes don’t stop flowin.’
Nadine Marshall, who plays all the characters in the play, transcends her appearance as she switches smoothly and convincingly between mother, father, brother, sister and teacher, through subtle changes in her stance and speech.
So what is Random’s message? That everything is not what it seems. A normal boy can be stabbed to death, the black community can be devastated and supportive, and our own assumptions can be unfounded.
To view the trailer, hear the podcast or add your comments visit: www.myspace.com/royalcourttheatre
To book visit: www.royalcourttheatre.com
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Madhvi Ramani praises Random, the latest play from debbie tucker green that taps into a growing crisis – random violence.
Joy Francis explains why BBC1’s new adult drama Mistresses feels as illicit as a late night raid on the fridge.
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