ALAN McGUIRE welcomes a biography of the French semiologist and philosopher
Barbed comments
Jellyfish is a pointed drama on attitudes towards disabilities, says MAYER WAKEFIELD
ALEX HALL is frustrated by a book that ducks a clear definition of terrorism and fails to perceive the role of the state in sponsoring it
JOE GILL wholeheartedly recommends an eloquent manifesto: how to change the world one local project at a time
Inspired by a photograph, a unique memorial in Michigan immortalises US true labour heroes. MICHAL BONCZA recalls a great story rarely told
MARIA DUARTE, LEO BOIX and ANGUS REID review Brides, Dead of Winter, A Night Like This, and The Librarians
MARIA DUARTE is entertained by a wry portrait of befuddled resistance to US authoritarianism
Jellyfish
Bush Theatre, London
THE BUSH theatre’s current season goes from strength to strength. After the visceral intensity of Arinze Kene’s Misty and a timely revival of Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking comes Ben Weatherill’s touching Jellyfish.
All three plays are authentic and tender explorations of marginalised working-class communities. But where the first two focus on the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in London, Weatherill takes us to the shores of Skegness to bring society’s stigmas around disabilities to the surface.
It's there that the hardened Agnes (Penny Layden) and her bubbly 28-year-old daughter Kelly (Sarah Gordy), who has Down’s syndrome, have settled into an insular and loving pattern of life which is suddenly upset by the arrival of comic-loving arcade supervisor Neil (Ian Bonar) into Kelly’s universe.
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