Who’s who?: Haley McGee (Deborah), Mia Soteriou (Ila) and Anjali Mya Chadha (Ayesha). Photo credit: Mark Douet
Theatre: The Yard Theatre
Play: Made Visible
Playwright: Deborah Pearson
Director: Stella Odunlami
Review by Irenosen Okojie
Deborah Pearson’s new play Made Visible at The Yard Theatre is an uncompromising and uncomfortable look at race through her lens as a white, middle class, well-travelled and educated woman.
Directed by Stella Odunlami, the play takes a gloriously simple, everyday scenario, an exchange between two women on a park bench, then deconstructs it from every feasible angle.
Deborah, (a skilful Haley McGee), sits next to an Indian woman called Ila (a delightfully caustic and funny Mia Soteriou), who is dressed in a sari. What follows is a comic, nuanced and often awkward series of interactions.
They exchange roles, including swapping the sari. They also question the text and their writer. The play deliberately collapses from the inside out, rebuilding itself with gusto, turning responses, ideas and notions of what one scene could be on its head.
It leaves the audience to consider the endless potential and versions of everyday encounters we trivialise. Made Visible explores what happens when we hone in on such scenes from multiple positions such as class and race.
While I like the cleverness of the actresses switching roles, at times it is dizzying. I also like the edgy shots of humour, peppered throughout the play. And there’s great support from Anjali Mya Chadha as Ayesha.
Pearson’s writer’s voice saturates each scene. We’re made aware of it almost as a form of interruption; a way of reminding the audience that she is fully conscious that hers is a perspective of privilege, which she uses to great effect.
The play examines what it means to be white and wants to engage with the complexities and dynamics of race, rather than shirking away from it or, even worse, pretending it doesn’t matter.
In one scene, Deborah recalls an experience with an old Canadian Indian boyfriend at the airport, namely his refusal to kiss her for fear of drawing attention to himself and of playing into the prejudices brown skinned men travelling through Western airports face.
She rakes over their interaction and her reaction to the scene. Equipped with the benefit of hindsight, she criticises her dismissive attitude of the past, questions her response and asks herself tough questions. In fact, difficult questions lie at the heart of Pearson’s vision.
Made Visible is an intelligent and demanding piece of theatre by a writer who interrogates our notions of race, privilege and guilt in a refreshing way
Made Visible is at The Yard Theatre until 9 April 2016.