In a cramped rehearsal room tucked among the City of London’s gleaming towers last week, a new theatre company wrestled with an urgent contemporary dilemma: how should adults respond to children who carry knives?
Not far from the lodgings where William Shakespeare wrote his “problem plays”, a cast assembled by the Upsetters, a minority-focused drama company, workshopped a scene set in a secondary school office where teachers talked to a mother about allegations that her son had brought in a “zombie killer” knife. The atmosphere was tense.
In May at the Soho theatre, the play will become the company’s first show in the West End, offering a potential breakthrough moment for the small outfit, which pledges to work only with theatre professionals from under-represented cultural backgrounds. But it was tense too because with knife crime rates in England last year a third higher than in 2010-11, the current approach is not working and school-age lives keep being lost.
In the last week, a 19-year-old student was stabbed to death in Northampton, burglars stabbed a man to death in Brentford, and an 18-year-old was left with life-changing stab injuries in Limehouse, east London.
The play, Dismissed, by Daniel Rusteau, a writer who has worked on UK and US TV, takes place mostly in a London secondary school after a knife falls from the bag of a black GCSE pupil. It follows the teachers and parents as they wrestle with the options. In an implicit repudiation of so much drama dealing with black lives that foregrounds street violence, neither boy nor knife appear on stage.
“It’s from the point of view of teachers and parents, because that’s where the discussion [about how to tackle the issue] is being had,” said Rusteau, 38. “It is challenging the way that we think is the right way of doing things – the ethical absolutes and what needs to change because something’s gone wrong.”
The producer and company founder, Marcus Bernard, 37, said: “It doesn’t glamorise the violence or the trauma of these young people.”
Rusteau said that in scripted TV drama, on the news and on shows such as Question Time, coverage of knife crime was often “fetishised” and “salacious”.
In April, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, announced a fresh plan to ban machetes and zombie knives in England and Wales, with people selling them facing up to two years in jail. In the year to March, 99 under-25s were killed with sharp objects in England and Wales.
The company also hopes the show will accelerate a correction in the under-representation of people of colour in the theatre world. In 2020, the trade body UK Theatre conceded that the “industry has traditionally been dominated by white people in its workforce and on its boards, and is still run and staffed in the main by white people.”
A 2017 survey of people who work offstage in UK theatres found that 93% were white, as compared with 86% of the general population. No single minority ethnic group made up more than 1% of the workforce.
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Rusteau said that when he was growing up he admired white playwrights such as David Hare and Martin McDonagh but lacked black role models.
Since then, writers such as Michaela Coel have become stars. The Upsetters believe that the more theatre that wrestles with today’s social problems is made by a diverse group of professionals, the better the social impacts may be.
“How [issues such as child knife possession] are depicted in news and media and in our TV and films, that also impacts how we as a general population understand those issues as well,” Bernard said. “And how we … think is the correct way to police our own children when that happens.”
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Dismissed by Daniel Rusteau runs at the Soho theatre from 16 May to 3 June 2023
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