Performances that dramatise protest can feel a little futile, presenting activism as an aesthetic experience while the real world rumbles on outside. Not so for Common/Wealth’s Demand the Impossible. Described as part-performance, part-punk gig and part-sensory experience, this is a striking work.
Structured around Taylor Edmond’s text of short episodic monologues, it resists an easy poeticism, instead focusing on the objectively descriptive. This is of the everyday, where injustice occurs around the peeling of apples, the making of sandwiches and the eating of crisps. Threading together the narratives of a Black Lives Matter activist, a blacklisted construction worker and an environmental campaigner, its characters have all been directly affected by police violence and undercover operations, the latter explicitly – as a victim of the spycops scandal. They’re played by Bianca Ali, Soul Roberts and Hussina Raja respectively, and there’s a smart frisson in how these well-known stories are articulated through everyday details before becoming symbolic of other lives ruined by state violence.
Under Rhiannon White’s direction, the production is perfectly calibrated. Set almost entirely to music performed live by Ollie Emanuel, Ruari Floyd and Jassen Summogum, it has an accumulative and sometimes almost oppressive power. One imagines this is the point. Performers are surveilled and, in a space designed by Nathaniel Mason, Studio of Mark Gubb and Andy Purves, both they and the audience are illuminated by projected live images, as if only through narrating oppression might it be rendered visible.
These individual transgressions accumulate into a catalogue of injustices, individual texts into a polyphony of voices. Throughout, it simmers with an indignant rage at the obscene scale of such abuses and particularly at their insidiousness. Beyond the targeting and ruining of individual lives, it draws attention to the manner in which family and home, and even love itself, is weaponised by the state.
The real world continues to rumble on outside. But at a time when legitimate protest (and repeated protest) is increasingly criminalised, the mere affirmation of activism feels significant, dramatised or not. This is potent and urgent theatre.
