Review: Cranes at Broadway Theatre ★★★★
Based on her true life story, Demi Wilson-Smith’s faces the societal cost of activism for a young black woman in 2010, and the backlash of police brutality and the injustice of the prison system.
Cranes | 23 September – 04 October | From £15
Curated by Ryan Calais Cameron, Cranes is one of three new plays commissioned to support three early-career Black and Global Majority writers based in Lewisham. A one-woman show, based on her true life story, Cranes highlights the hope of wanting to make a positive difference, while showing the reality of how much the system fights against those who speak up.
Demi is eighteen. It’s 2010. Her whole life is ahead of her- or so it seems. She’s facing this new era of adulthood with two things: Her camera, and her passport. She’s going to be the first in her family to go to university, and she’s going to study the one thing she loves more than anything– Photography. But there’s something else she’s facing that those 20 years ago did not; university tuition fees. And they’re about to get worse. So with her camera and her bestie, Sasha by her side, she aims to change the world with her first protest, crying “No ifs, no buts, no education cuts”.
Demi brings about the most poignant performer presence, and flows easily between the in-jokes of growing up in South London and the more serious tone of police brutality while she’s attending the protests. Her ease between these two energies highlights the humanness of her script, as well as her skill as an artist.
The staging of the show stays the same, with the lighting and use of it all shifting as the story does. The stage has a showering of 995 or so cranes dangling above the actress, a rainbow scattering of light folding in and out of their origami shadows. What is a minor detail in the story becomes the throughline of the reason this artist is telling her story at all. The relevance of the cranes doesn’t reveal itself until the final moment. Demi tells the audience that these cranes are a reminder–a reminder that amongst the chaos of trying to make our way in the world, it’s important to hold onto the smallest pieces of hope. It is the hope at the end of the day that keeps us going.
Cranes shows that in a chaotic, unsteady, and unjust world, hope for a better one is really all we have to hold onto.
I am a Reviewer at To Do List. I love critical thinking and despise generated-A.I. My happy place is drinking a steamed chai latte, while typewriting a poem as I’m cozying up with a cat on a rainy day. I think the Pilot G2 05 pen is the best writing tool. Theatre performance is my life-passion, but I also find joy in a long train ride, a romance novel, and a sappy story. I believe it is the small things in life that truly become the big things.
