TALAWA, Britain’s leading black theatre company, have released their third and fourth short dramatised monologues based on verbatim interviews with black key workers on the front line of the Covid crisis.
We hear the daily experiences of a railway worker and a part-time supermarket assistant, and their tales make for interesting comparisons and contrasts.
The good-humoured demeanour of Kwame Bentil’s middle-aged train despatch worker conceals a thinly veiled frustrated anger at the behaviour of many of the station travellers he meets.
The irony implicit in a black passenger refusing to stop smoking on the platform until a white manager tells him to brings home the entrenched racism in much of the public’s consciousness.