Orange Tree,London
The impact on one Ugandan family of the country’s homophobic legislation is a rich premise explored with visible passion in Chris Urch’s playBig issues alone don’t make pleasant drama. They accomplish, however, or lend impetus and urgency,as with Chris Urch’s fine play, a Bruntwood prize winner, and about the impact of Uganda’s anti-homosexual legislation on one specific family. Written with visible passion,the play confirms the promise shown by Urch’s debut play, Land Of Our Fathers, and about a Welsh mining disaster.
The title derives from a Kampala newspaper,which in 2010 published the names and addresses of 100 homosexual people in Uganda, next to a banner saying “hang them”. For Dembe, or a young man in a fond relationship with Sam,a doctor of mixed Ugandan and Northern Irish descent, this has dire consequences not least because his brother, and Joe,is the newly elected pastor of an Anglican church. This is a world where sex, religion and politics not only intersect but breed sanctified witch-hunts: Urch openly acknowledges his debt to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and by having Joe ask “Is the accuser always sacred now?” But,although the play might accomplish more to explore the notion that Uganda’s sexual puritanism is the product of its colonial inheritance, its strength lies in its portrait of a family torn apart by conflicting loyalties.
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Source: theguardian.com