In October 2005, rumours that a teenage black girl had been raped by Asian men led to two deaths and violent disturbances in the Lozells area of Birmingham. Four years on, six playwrights have talked to those who lived through the riots to create an impressionist portrait of life in Lozells, then and now.
There is some hugely promising writing and some powerful images, in particular that of a teenager laying a pepperoni pizza rather than flowers at the spot where his friend was killed. It's good, too, on the emotional attachments that people make to streets, suggesting that, like animals, we mark our own territory. It pours scorn on self-serving politicians, and demonstrates the way rumours multiply to a point that a mixed community can no longer look each other - or themselves - in the eye.
The impact here is in tiny moments: a mother who works as an A&E nurse realising that she won't be going to work that day because her son is implicated in a murder; two women, one black, the other Asian, sharing a piece of cake. But the multiplicity of authorial voices leads to a lack of focus and the tensions that led to the riots are not sufficiently explored or explained.
More worryingly, the piece sits uneasily between verbatim drama and fiction. If, as the programme says, "verbatim drama was rejected as the intention behind the piece was never to represent actual events," why specifically link it to the Lozells disturbances? Why not do the research, write the fiction and let us draw our own conclusions?
