(Lyn Gardner’s article appeared in the Guardian, 8/3.)
A decade ago, Fraser Grace had a hit at the RSC with Breakfast With Mugabe, a play about the Zimbabwean president and the colonial legacies that supported his rise to power. Now, in the RSC’s Making Mischief season, which looks at how we live now, Grace turns his attention to a society living on the edge of sanity as it is faced with intensifying attacks from within. Once again, the past has come to haunt the present, and it leaves only destruction as it turns the city to ash.
We often talk about playwrights being prescient, but Always Orange feels particularly so, in light of recent events in France and Germany. He presents us with a city very much like the London we know, but where random terrorist attacks have become so commonplace that even a trip to the park is fraught with danger and anxiety. It’s the monsters of the mind that inflict the most damage in a city where the gap between rich and poor, privilege and disaffection, leads to disaster.