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.
