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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Robert Booth Social affairs correspondent

Theatre company wrestles with knife crime in its first West End show

Marcus Bernard (left) and Daniel Rusteau
Marcus Bernard (left), the Upsetters’ founder, and Daniel Rusteau, the show’s writer. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

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.

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