Thus, Sasha Frost, playing Kay with a sense of curiosity, humour and vulnerability, goes through a nonlinear sequence of scenes that feels dreamy and elliptical. The structure is such an integral feature of the book that playwright Tanika Gupta has good reason to hold on to it in this adaptation for the National Theatre of Scotland and Home, Manchester. It has the impressionistic quality of a collage, as if to reflect the nebulous nature of identity. In chapters that jump backwards and forwards, from her first adult encounter with her birth mother to her childhood experience of racist taunting, the book takes a circuitous route. It’s called Red Dust Road, but the poet’s path to discovering her birth parents is anything but straight. P art of the appeal of Jackie Kay’s memoir is the way it loops through time.
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