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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Arifa Akbar

Wedding Band: A Love Hate Story in Black and White review – high-stakes passion in the segregated south

Alice Childress Deborah Ayorinde Civil Rights South Carolina
Deborah Ayorinde and David Walmsley in Wedding Band at Lyric Hammersmith.
Lived-in ardour … Deborah Ayorinde and David Walmsley in Wedding Band at Lyric Hammersmith. Photograph: Mark Senior

‘It’s wrong to hate, they say. It’s wrong to love, too.” So says Julia, a Black American woman who falls in love with a white man, Herman, when it is dangerous to do so. Alice Childress’s play is set in 1918 and was written in 1962 , but it was some years before a theatre dared to stage it amid the civil rights struggle

Julia (Deborah Ayorinde) and Herman (David Walmsley) live in segregated South Carolina where interracial relationships are illegal. The play opens on an anniversary when a wedding band is presented as a promise – a hope – of one day living as man and wife.

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