Strange Fruit

About

A Bush Theatre production

I go half way round the world and back thinking I’d made some sort of discovery and come back to find the same damn lies, the same white lies, the same black lies.

Alvin and Errol can’t picture much of a future for themselves. They’re young, Black and living in England in the 1980s, with an entire country and political system set against them. Angry and restless, they focus firmly on their past – the sunny Caribbean and heroic father they left behind when their mother brought them to England twenty years ago.

But when Alvin returns home from his grandfather’s funeral a new version of their past emerges and the two brothers are caught in a desperate struggle to unearth the truth about their existence.

Powerful and compelling, this faithful revival of Caryl Phillips’ 1980s masterpiece is the story of a family caught between two cultures, and the uncrossable no man’s land that can come between parents and their children. It is directed by Nancy Medina (The Half-God of Rainfall, Persistence of Memory, Dutchman).

Strange Fruit is the latest edition in the Passing the Baton series, following Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking in 2018. Passing The Baton is the Bush Theatre’s three-year commitment to re-staging masterpieces by artists of colour who have been written out of history.

‘A work of real substance’
The Guardian ★★★★

‘A story that reverberates, echoes and expands far outside the theatre walls’
Time Out ★★★★

‘Potent and affecting’
The Stage ★★★★