Tight, muted and thoughtful, Fred D'Aguiar's second play transplants a group of Jamaican WW2 air force volunteers to Somewhere In Scotland and confronts them with the prejudices of ignorance – the sort that lead to one of them being stripped naiked to see whether he has a tail. The issue of otherness has been raised even before they left home, over the imperatives of enlisting to aid a "mother" country which grants them no effective voice in their own lives. D'Aguiar's unostentatious poetic phrasing accounts for much of the air of originality surrounding these musings: it is delivered with verve and assurance by a company who, in addition, can skilfully manoeuvre even a lethargic matinée audience around a promenade space.
Written for City Limits magazine.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.
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