If conscience is to be your guide, is it actually possible to live in the world? If you put every action, every dependency, to intense moral questioning, how can you act at all? In today’s secular world that’s a question with which many individuals wrestle, and it is one that Quakers, and religious groups that like them put the focus on a guiding inner light, have been grappling for centuries.

These are the questions facing the two central characters in Elizabeth Kuti’s The Sugar Wife, which has just transferred from Dublin, the setting of the play. But this is the 1840s city, in a nation already on the edge of economic and social collapse.

Hannah Tewkley (Jane Brennan), an intense, mid-30s, childless Quaker wife almost consumed by a career in “good works”, has an uneasy relationship with her own body, but an even more uncomfortable relationship with her husband Samuel (Barry Barnes). He is a tea, coffee and sugar merchant who plans to branch out into oriental tea-houses. He squares his own rather flexible conscience in using America – slave-grown – sugar, amidst other moral “crimes”, by funding his wife’s philanthropy and pointing to the likely fate of his employees were he to go out of business.

Into this volatile, uncomfortable house are invited – at the insistence of Hannah – two visiting anti-slavery campaigners, the former slave Sarah Worth (Susan Salmon) and the man who bought her out of slavery, the rich-boy turned rebel Alfred Darby (Robert Price). The latter has apparently solved the problem of conscience by living entirely by his principles – to the point, it emerges, of living on Sarah’s earnings so he can devote himself to his “work” and to “art” (producing daguerreotypes).
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There are some moments from Tamasha’s production of A Fine Balance, which has premiered at the Hampstead Theatre, that I will remember for long time. There’s the opening scene, of a legless beggar, who skims around the stage seeking alms amid an imaginary traffic jam, evoked by a soundscape and smellscape that immediately transported me to Calcutta, the site of my first encounter-shock with the sub-continent. Then there’s the stunningly effective puppetry that solves the problem of animal and child characters – the “death” of one animal puppet produces an almost audience-wide audible gasp.

Yet these excellent moments are blended to produce a dull, if worthy, whole. The play is based on the eponymous Booker-shortlisted novel by Rohinton Mistry, one of those classic Indian sprawling epics, in this case exploring the impact of Indira Gandhi’s 1975 Emergency, which imposed martial rule on the world’s “largest democracy”.

The story, by and large, is of the effects on the poor – the slum-dwellers thrown out of their homes and driven into pointless stone-breaking, morale-sapping labour; their employers, only marginally more economically secure, left without workers; the men and women sterilised by force … the novel is a great sweeping tale. The play takes in all of their stories, yet while it leaps from drama to drama, from crisis to crisis, the action on stage is slow, even langorous. This is a neat synopsis of a play, but the heart, the soul, is missing.

Part of the problem is that none of the characters is developed – they are more archetypes than people. I naturally sympathise with Dina Dalal (Sudha Bhuchar). We meet her as a sweat-shop employer, but she gradually emerges as a struggling woman, a widow, determined to maintain her independence in a male-dominated world, if only to remain out of the uncaring clutches of her bullying brother. But she is a stereotype, if an admirable stereotype; we never learn more. What was her relationship with her husband; what gave her the steel to battle on to the bitter end? (The book answers these questions; the drama does not.)
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In 1904, in a small, ragged parlour in a house in the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, nearly 40 years after the official abolition of slavery in America, a mismatched group of black people are struggling to find a way to survive and thrive in a white world.

Solly Two Kings (Joseph Marvell), professional dog-shit collector, looks like a buffoon, until he explains that his stick is notched 62 times, for each slave he helped guide to freedom on the Underground Railroad. He sums up the predicament these ex-slaves and younger freeborn Blacks face: “Freedom. I got it, but what is it? I still aint found out.”

Eli (Lucian Msamati), his friend and comrade, is building a wall around this house, hoping to keep its inhabitants safe, with the help of an intruder, the ironically named Citizen Barlow (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), who looks like a man with problems. He’s tried to find a decent, fair-paying job, and failed, but the weight on his shoulders is more than that.

Always in the house is Aunt Esther Tyler (Carmen Munroe), who claims to be 285 years old, and certainly is regarded, almost worshipped, as a seer and problem-solver. She’s also fervently religious – but does this really help the people she guides? Caring for her is Black Mary (Jenny Jules – who is notable for a really stunning stage presence), who has fled the “Uncle Tom” ways of her bullying brother Caesar (Patrick Robinson), who has chosen to carve out a place for himself by enforcing the white men’s law.

The play is Gem of the Ocean, the work of August Wilson, who died last year at the tragically young age of 60, and one of a cycle of ten that, decade by decade, tell the story of the black experience in America. It is the fifth of his plays to have UK premieres at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, that northwest London theatre jewel.
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The war is over; now celebrate. We’ve all seen images of what the end of a war – a real, nation-threatening war – looks like: complete strangers kissing fervently in the street, dancing in the fountains, a general state of euphoria.

Yet a war leaves scars, and pushes aside problems that will now re-emerge. That’s as true in the victorious Sparta as John Ford’s The Broken Heart opens, as it was in Britain in 1944, and so the staging of the play in 1940s dress in a new production at the White Bear Theatre comes to make perfect sense.

With all of its surging hormones and thwarted passions this is a play suited to a mostly young cast, yet it is still a brave project for Secret Centre Theatre to take on with a group of actors just out of drama school.

Yet this is a successful production, even a triumphant production. These grand, tragic characters (it is easy to see why the early 19th-century Romantics loved this play) are played not as archetypes, but as real humans wrestling with their problems – if often spectacularly unsuccessfully. A few of the minor characters in the cast of 17 struggle with the Caroline language, but generally it is delivered with verve and pace, carrying the audience along with it.
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Ever since the first Homo sapiens emerged from her cave on an idle morning and wondered “Who am I?” the human race has been inventing and re-inventing answers to that question. The latest people to pick up on that have been the scientists, as they start to tackle the great question of consciousness.

Their interest has been caught by dramatists, with On Ego opening last month at the Soho Theatre and Imposters opening tonight at the Union Theatre in Southwark. This surely must be the first London season that two plays have appeared in which a major part is played by the rare and strange Capgras’ Syndrome – in which the victim of a brain injury believes their nearest and dearest have been replaced by near-identical imposters. (Meanwhile in New York there’s a whole theatre festival on the subject, in which this play is included.)

Yet, when you think about it, what better way to tackle issues of identity than this? Certainly the American playwright Justin Warner has used this as a fruitful way to approach what is a common tale – a family and a marriage under strain when the children have grown up and the holes at the heart of a long marriage are suddenly exposed.
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Get together a group of women who’ve lived, loved and lost, mix in some alcohol and the freedom from inhibition that comes the luxury of “us” time, and you’ll hear things that make young males blush to their fingertips.

I can only conclude that the writer and director of The Ark, The Bride and the Coffin, who happens to be a bloke, has been listening in to many such evenings. For what is distinctive about Andrew Neil’s three discrete, if linked by theme and motif, short plays is that the characters always say the unsayable, always complete those sentences usually left to trail away into embarrassed silence.

Anal sex, penis size, menstruation, miscarriage and more – none of the gory details are veiled in silence. This is the female experience laid out in pain and anger, and many, many laughs. (Happily this is all talk, not action.)

The production company, inaccurately called fluff, was formed two years ago to promote “good writing and roles for women”, and there’s a lot here, at The Old Red Lion Theatre in Islington, for the six-strong female cast to get their hearts into.
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