Friday, November 22

Tag: Samuel Tracy

Half Empty Glasses – Roundabout @ Summerhall
Scotland

Half Empty Glasses – Roundabout @ Summerhall

After the success of Patricia Gets Ready, Kaleya Baxe returns to direct in collaboration with playwright Baruwa-Etti for a story of friendship, anger and courage where nothing is completely black or white. Half Empty Glasses is a coming-of-age story that explores what it means to step into a world of possibility and begin to see its injustices, deformities and annihilating inequalities, coming face to face with one's own powerlessness for the first time. Hovering between the possibility of a radiant future and a bleak present, overshadowed by his father's degenerative illness, Toye (Samuel Tracy), the true dramatic focus of the play, is filled with a blind rage, toxic even, for those close to him, especially his friends Remi (Princess Khumalo) and Asha (Sara Hazemi). A play that aim...
A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain – Roundabout @ Summerhall
Scotland

A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain – Roundabout @ Summerhall

Sami Ibrahim plays with the fable element to try to give new depth and strength to the old theme of immigration and British imperialism, creating a play that is surreal and cruelly realistic at the same time. The young London playwright tries to add levity and hope to the tale of a precarious, exhausting and irretrievably broken life and to make the injustice of a cruel and impersonal system even more evident through the strong contrast with the fairy-tale element. The play is indeed well written and superbly acted by the three cast members, Sara Hazemi, Princess Khumalo and Samuel Tracy, but at times verbose and unmoving. Ibrahim gets lost in metaphors, double meanings and symbols, and forgets to give us the human element, the only one that can really touch the audience. The story of E...