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The week in theatre: The Protest; Rockets and Blue Lights; PlacePrints; Charlie Ward – review

Urgent new perspectives on George Floyd’s death and the slave trade’s place in art; pastoral meditations from David Rudkin and an unforgettable wartime soundscape

Every week, a new catastrophe: on the day that Boris Johnson announced plans for the reopening of pubs and cinemas, but did not mention theatres, the Theatre Royal Plymouth announced that it was beginning redundancy consultations, with more than 100 jobs likely to vanish.

Every week, dramatic ingenuity. When the Bush theatre asked six black British artists to respond to the killing of George Floyd, the results, collectively called The Protest, were varied, disturbing, urgent. Matilda Ibini supplied advice to her younger self: don’t try to please. Kalungi Ssebandeke raps to footage of confrontations between police and protesters. Fehinti Balogun shows, in a text-message conversation, a white friend slithering away from acknowledging privilege. Roy Williams provides a graphic study of what it is to be terrorised: speaking Williams’s words, Aaron Pierre’s face seems to have been pushed out from within, swollen with grief and fear.

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