Bush Theatre

It’s the labels you notice first on the set of After Sunday. Stuck to the doors of the duck-egg blue kitchen cupboards, they helpfully signal the contents within each: spices, baking trays, first aid kits. The setting is clearly educational – a food technology classroom or adult education centre, perhaps. Yet the labels on the higher cupboards, just out of reach, in Claire Winfield’s set hint at a different story. They’re labelled too, but with diagnoses. ‘Highly disturbed’ reads one cupboard, ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder’ another. Labels also adorn the edge of the raised stage, attached to boxes of case files for men we are yet to meet. You could say that After Sunday, the debut play from the Bush Theatre Writer’s Group alum Sophia Griffin, is a show about labels on a metaphorical level too. They separate the free from the bound, prison staff from prisoners, and shape how the male characters see themselves in relation to one another. Within director Corey Campbell’s production, mundanity and mental health also exist in opposition. After all, we see the kitchen long before occupational therapist Naomi (Aimée Powell) and the members of the newly formed Caribbean cooking class she’s started enter the room. The result is a heady production (co-produced with Belgrade Theatre) that plays with the surreal while never losing sight of the cruel reality it is situated within. From the moment Leroy (David Webber), Daniel (Darrel Bailey and Ty (Corey Weekes) walk into the kitchen...

This acclaimed show from Palestinian actor and comic Alaa Shehada offers a powerful but irreverent recollection of growing up in the troubled country. The titular horse is a scuplture on a roundabout that Shehada used to play under as a child. Recently bulldozed by occupying Israeli forces, in this solo show Shehada ponders its fate.