Blue/Orange

Joe Penhall’s landmark drama about mental health and race in Britain has been revived frequently in the twenty-five years since it was first performed. This production from director James Haddrell boasts a rather impressive contributor for the relatively small Greenwich Theatre: Penhall himself has updated his own text, changing its junior psychiatrist character from a white man to an Asian woman. The drama, in which a junior and senior psychiatrist with radically different agendas clash over whether a clearly still very ill Black patient should be released back into the community perhaps feels like a product of the New Labour era. But Penhall’s goal in changing the character is to update the play both thematically and in terms of better reflecting the modern day NHS.