With the cost of living crisis a reality dominating the headlines and that many are confronted with, we’re in a time, post pandemic, where we’re examining societal structures and how communities have been impacted – previous conditions only exaggerated and brought to the fore within the past 2 years. Inspired by real life stories and very rightly highlighting working class voices of London in his work Block’dOff, Kieton Saunders-Browne presents a timely portrait of survival in increasingly tough times.
One performer, various lives as we encounter the hopes, fears, interactions, and thoughts that pre-occupy the residents of a block of inner London flats, performer Camila Segala captivating, brazen, observant lead taking on the roles of a Brazilian elderly lady, drug dealer and his partner, a father and daughter and Oxford drop out. What we slowly start to see is a community in isolation trying whatever they can to get by, the father determined for his daughter to succeed in her law exams and so employing the services of the ex Oxford law student to help with her studies, the elderly Brazilian florist alone, in need of companionship and the overseeing eye, the drug dealer and his partner charismatic, doing whatever it takes to afford them both the luxuries – we see how one event triggers off a chain of unfortunate ones and with it, bring about chaos within the locality.
Saunders-Browne is charmingly able to sway between the comical and the sentimental, we gauge the community’s toughness, a need to be like this in order to take on whatever the day has in store for them. We see straightforward, personable accounts of what is, and how within this smaller ecosystem, wider society operates and favours particular people and not others. A necessary watch!
Written by Lucy Basaba.
Block’d Off is currently showing until Monday 22nd August/Wednesday 24th until Monday 29th August 2022 at the Pleasance Courtyard – Upstairs. To find out more about the production, visit here…
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