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Home Reviews

Review: Concrete Hearts from Playing On

Magdalena Pulit by Magdalena Pulit
August 3, 2020
Reading Time: 3min read
Concrete Hearts Review

Concrete Hearts Review

Concrete Hearts is more than a remote theatrical production. It is a digital live experience, written and performed by young people. Together, they create Drilling Diamonds – a programme for the youth for whom witnessing crime and violence could constitute their daily routine, led by Playing ON charity.

Therefore, the show undoubtedly touches upon valid and extremely current topics. The plot oscillates around the death of Kane, killed in a gang fight and subsequently, contrastive concepts of grief within his community. His cousin, JJ releases a track glorifying violence that raises different reactions among members of his family.

However, the story in Concrete Hearts goes deeper and unravels secrets and issues of all the characters somehow related to one another – brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, boyfriends and girlfriends. Primarily, it delivers an honest depiction of the black community and constitutes a refreshing counterbalance to mass media, still not handling the problem of misrepresentation. The text of the play, written by Michael Amaning deserves the applause as the short but content-full dialogues accurately capture the whole wide range of emotions and relationships. The oxymoronic title perfectly conveys the show’s conflicting values – violence, crime and aggression on the one hand, and grief, loyalty, concern and family on the other.

The interactive form of Concrete Hearts should be noticed too. The live event combines excerpts from the film, live hot seating of the characters and community conversation, all interlaced with the original tracks written by the company. ‘The Role of a Woman’ deserves particular attention as it is not only catchy but also, extremely touching.

The live hot seating of the characters does not seem so convincing, due to both not the greatest quality of the live stream (the ongoing problem of the remote theatre) and quite an artificial, static setting. The excerpts from the film, however, are far more gripping as the young people from Drilling Diamonds developed an interesting socially distanced filming method. It is not a simple Zoom call; instead, the phones are filmed from above to show the conversations between the characters. This method definitely delivers a bigger picture and brings the characters closer together. Moreover, even different phone models belonging to different characters contribute somehow to their diverse depiction.

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Even if some of the young actors are not as great as Tavoi Warren (KT) in the role of JJ and they do not face up to big themes such as DON’T GLORIFY VIOLENCE or WISDOM OF A WOMAN, the show is definitely worth seeing, even for the involvement and passion of these young hearts, made of something way softer than concrete.

Stream Concrete Hearts Here

Summary
Reviewer
Magdalena Pulit
Review Date
2020-08-03
Reviewed Item
Concrete Hearts from Playing On
Author Rating
31star1star1stargraygray
Event
Concrete Hearts from Playing On
Magdalena Pulit

Magdalena Pulit

Magdalena is a student of English Language and Literature Linguistics at The University of Edinburgh, she reads 3 books a week and speaks 4 languages. Magdalena writes in the Music section for The Student newspaper – the oldest student newspaper in UK. She is an aspiring musician with 9 years of experience in music college a guitar and piano player, vocalist and new songwriter.

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