‘It’s not Black Lives Matter,” says one of the characters in Hannah Lavery’s damning new play. “This is Scotland. It’s not the same.” The police forcefully hold a young black man on the ground. Within 90 minutes, the father of two is dead. But this is not Minneapolis in 2020. Rather, this is Kirkcaldy in 2015 and the man is 31-year-old gas engineer Sheku Bayoh. Behaving erratically in the early hours of a May morning, Bayoh was held down by several officers. By the time they stood up he was unconscious. [READ MORE]
By Mark Fisher
MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).