Michele's first ever national review
The Daily Telegraph, January 20, 1983.
THE BEST OF BRIXTON
It may be crude, it may be untidy and rough, but "Riot Party" at the Young Vic is also the first play I have come across to dramatise the Brixton riots of 1981 and give some sense of the passions behind that alarming event. The play won the first prize of £750 in a competition sponsored by this theatre's World Wildlife Fund on the theme of decay in the inner city. The author is Michele Celeste, a young Italian philosophy student who in his three years in this country has kept himself, learned English and studied at close quarters the festering relations between the black community and the authorities.
When the police suspect they have found a petrol bomb factory, they wreck the home of a young West Indian, Leroy, and arrest his father. However his friends, both black and white, clear up the mess and help him to celebrate his engagement to an Irish girl, Diana.
The party is interrupted by the arrival from the rioting streets outside of a wounded policeman stabbed by Leroy to revenge his Dad's arrest. Diana breaks oft with him in horror. Leroy, touched by the youth and helplessness of the boy he has almost killed, attempts to save his life when rioters set the building on fire.
It is a naive enough fable, but has the double merit of sharp characterization and an impartial view of the crisis. The impatience of the beleaguered police it dealt with as sympathetically as the predicament of the blacks. Their eruption of rage is seen as partly due to the community's neglect, but above all to their frustration at being left ignorant by an inadequate and unimaginative education. These feelings are given some eloquence by the young company's best speaker, Tracy Brown, and interesting performances come from Francis Elliot as a shifty white looter and Treva Etienne as the disturbed and excitable Leroy. JOHN BARBER
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