The Stage

We Are Shadows

Published Friday 28 September 2007 at 10:50 by Susan Elkin

FinnKennedy’s beautifully constructed new play is based on recent work with young people in Tower Hamlets through Half Moon’s Careers in Theatre programme. The ingenious result is nine monologues by characters whose lives are tangentially hooked together by all the day-to-day horrors (many) and joys (few) of teenage East London life.

First there’s Sam, played by Daniel Broadhurst, whose brother had been killed and whose venomous but poignant rage is hurled relentlessly at the audience. In the end he kills a Muslim taxi driver whose daughter (Samantha Schefele) gives us the next immaculately paced monologue. Then, later, there’s a care home worker played with warmth and panache by Samantha Schefele, who is also the girlfriend (sort of) of a geeky but dangerously manic lad splendidly played by Broadhurst. The play ends where it began - with Sam being filmed in prison by Sagar, a Somali refugee played by Tracy Green with gentle dignity.

The versatility of these three young actors is astounding. It isn’t often a cast of three can fool an experienced theatre-goer. For most of this show, having not read the programme in advance, I thought there were four actors not three because Tracy Green as Nicola, an in your face East Ender struggling to cope with a new baby - or a Tesco till girl - is a million miles from her Sagar role. Broadhurst’s doubling as a market trader is disconcertingly convincing too. And the well directed scene in which Broadhurst and Schefele drive a foundling baby to hospital when neither has a driving licence is hilarious theatre - although it ends, predictably, in tragedy.