10 Playwrights respond to the General Election

Royal Court at Elephant & Castle

This was an evening of readings of ten plays commissioned as a response to, and written during and immediately after, the general election.

The quality and range of the writing was extraordinary, from the surreal and biting to the naturalistic and pedestrian. I thought ten short plays might be too much for my attention span, but the whole evening really hung together well, and because of the multitude of voices on display, from all sorts of cultural backgrounds, it felt a more real portrayal of a Britain on the edge than any number of TV documentaries. Great stuff, and not just because my old man wrote one  and youngson and two of his mates were in it.

It was the first time I had ever been inside the Elephant & Castle shopping centre, and it is another world in there. Like many big shopping centres, the major chains have bailed out, but they seem to have done so at Elephant & Castle in a more wholesale fashion than anywhere else I have been. However, the empty shops have been filled by local entrepreneurs that reflect and cater to the multicultural community of the area. So you have an authentic Mexican restaurant/bar, a polish restaurant, a place to get jerk chicken and rice and peas and drink rum, a sari shop. It’s great. Beats monocultural, mainstream Churchill Square in Brighton by a long shot.

The Royal Court have set up a theatre in an empty space, and you sit in there (sweltering) watching the play as the saturday night shopping centre stuff goes on just outside the plate glass window. It felt very alive and very central to real life. However, the audience was exactly the same as the Sloane Square lot, myself included. I should imagine I was not the only one stepping foot inside the Elephant & Castle shopping centre for the first time.