Chickenshed is bold and inclusive, so we shouldn’t be surprised that amongst the ten short plays in the compilation entitled Changes Rota Two, there should be a drama about Palestine, probably one of the first in London since 7 October 2023.
Conversations with My Father, created, written and performed by Gemilla Shamruk with Dave Carey, opens with a woman wearing a long, black, loose-fitting jibab praying. She removes the jibab and asks us what thoughts went across our minds when we first saw her. “Did they include the word terrorist?”
British of Palestinian heritage, Iman is played powerfully by Gemilla then tries to speak to her father still living in Palestine. He is understandably fearful of saying much about what is happening, so she decides to visit.
We get flashbacks to an earlier visit when she was told of a close relative who became a martyr, a term used to indicate someone killed by an aggressor which we assume refers to Israel.
She arrives anxiously at the airport, but officials refuse to let her into the country, detaining her for over eight hours.
It is not the only topical piece in the collection. The Ethics of Angelina by Sophie White addresses the very imminent threat to our employment future of artificial intelligence in a quirky, believable encounter between two individuals applying for a job.
The young man, Dylan (Hector Dogliani), arrives just in time to hear the facilitator ask the applicants to introduce themselves to someone else in the group. Turning to the woman Angelina (Lucy-Mae Beacock) sitting in the next seat to him, he quickly goes through the requirements, even making a joke.
Her response to the joke is odd and a clue to her identity, which she reveals with her admission that she got some rain in her system. Surprised, he impulsively calls her a robot. She points out that she prefers to self-identify by the term AI.
They will later meet when they will express some of the reasons why we should be deeply concerned about the development of AI.
Both actors give strong performances, with Lucy-Mae conveying an ambiguity in her behaviour that seems both human and something else, while Hector captures very believably a restless frustration with a world that leaves him powerless in the face of rapid social change.
Another person who feels powerless is Sarah (Abbi Dockerty), stuck in traffic en route to an interview in the play Changing Lanes by Lara Sparey. As she waits, knowing she won't be able to arrive in time for the interview, she speculates on the luxurious life she might have had if she had been the woman in the supercar stuck next to her.
The Deal by Callum Clesham throws a spotlight on a ruthless employer, played by Vittorio Matta, who has ripped off people such as the young woman (Lucina Rigobert) he dismissively speaks to at the opening of the play. However, he is later visited by a mysterious supernatural figure (Ginny Taub) who offers him a very attractive if cruel deal. All he has to do is sign a piece of paper, but will he?
Most of the brief plays in this collection are not explicitly political, though for instance, the complicated feelings of Tony (Rocco McHugh) and Ryan (Hussain Raza) in Ali Hardy’s Mixed Messages do tune into a world where being openly gay can still attract prejudice and cruel treatment.
That is not to say heterosexual relationships are easy, as we can see in The Enterprise by Carol Kearney, in which Nick (Sean Baradhi) tracks down the whereabouts of his former girlfriend Elle (Siena Tullock-Bisgrove) whom he misses, to her job in a pub. Between her serving the drinks and gently reproaching him for the way they parted, they gradually recall reasons why they still care for each other.
The sensitive, positive letters of two sisters in Abbi Dockerty’s Impact Letter depict, in three voice-overs and dance, a woman recovering from mental ill health. The older sister (Ellie Carroll) is the first voice we hear, speaking to her unwell sister, to be followed by the voices of that sister (Keiralyn Singleton) sometime later reflecting on that difficult time and then speaking directly with her fifteen-year-old former self (Angie Pascall).
The seriousness of the drama is lightened in the short comic sketch Avatars by Alyssia Jones & Rocco McHugh, in which three people, played by Charlotte Antoine-Swinburne, Jack Harris and Mouse O’Hehir, look through a clothes rack trying not to fit into gender stereotypes, for as one of them observes, “femininity is more about your looks than about your body.”
Many of the ten plays have moments of humour, but two are so deliberately funny that they had a man sitting two rows down from me laughing so much I wondered if he might burst a blood vessel.
Ashley Driver’s spoof documentary The Granville Experiment imagines a meeting being set up between the slightly cartoonish characters Barry (Jonny Morton) and Roger (Edward Doglianni), who formed a successful band in the 1970s before it split as a result of them fighting at the Hanshin Koshin stadium in Japan. But will the meeting mend bridges or reopen old wounds?
The situation comedy Order Confirmed by Sebastian Ross gives us the fractious, developing contact between James (Ashley Driver), who daily orders a meal from the same place, and the sociable delivery driver Nick (Jimmy Adamou), who tends to accompany his delivery with a friendly greeting and isn’t always easy with getting a chilly reception that doesn’t seem to recognise him as a human being.
It is an amusing, well-performed finish to an entertaining evening spent in the company of a confident, engaging group of performers.