For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf review

(L-R) Alex Thomas-Smith, Nadine Higgin, Cherrelle Skeete, Ibilola Rossi and Tatenda Naomi Matsvai in for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf at The Yard Theatre - (Camilla Greenwell)

Nothing underlines the fragile liveness of theatre more than an audience emergency. When a woman in the front row fainted during Ntozake Shange’s impressionistic, poetic expression of black women’s experience, the performers quit the stage and the auditorium was speedily cleared by the Yard’s impeccable young ushers.

Thirty minutes later, after reassurance from a stage manager that the woman was fine and sitting up in an ambulance, the quintet of performers in Diane Page’s 50th-anniversary production resumed. It was as if the lyrical threads of Shange’s writing and the swirling mixed mood of heavy and light, joy and pain, had never been interrupted. Wild applause was earned.