Crossings

Written by Julie McNamara
Unity Theatre (20th November 2009)

Reviewed by Mari Jones

A heavily pregnant teen called Shelley (Nadine Wild Palmer) stumbles onto Canning Dock in Liverpool, hiding from a gang of boys who until recently were her friends. She’s stolen their drugs and she’s desperately waiting for her boyfriend Darren to save her. But while she’s waiting, she meets two very strange characters who take her to shelter on an old ship, the Zong. But is there more to them than meets the eye?

Crossings is a mysterious production which is all about slavery, both of the past and the present. The two characters Shelley meets are ghosts of the past – Nzingah (Margo Cargill) was a slave on the Zong, and Heggarty (Julie McNamara) was an Irish slave who dressed as a man to escape the ship she was on. They bring their terrible stories to life and make Shelley see just how bad her own life is: a girl just fifteen and pregnant who has sold herself (literally) to the boys she thought were her friends – a modern day slave.

And that is pretty much all there is to Crossings. Although it quite cleverly uses the idea of ghosts of the past to show old and modern injustices, it doesn’t really go anywhere.

So although the story is exemplary and the performances are good, Crossings ends up being a mess of big ideas that drags, with an ending that will have been guessed by the whole audience before it even gets halfway through.

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