Noughts and Crosses: Like being battered over the head with a strobe light

Telegraph

09-07-2025

First published in 2001, Noughts and Crosses, Malorie Blackman's racially-charged take on Romeo and Juliet, pulls no punches in depicting the devastating impact of racism. Nearly a quarter of a century on, its audacious imagining of a world divided into a black ruling class (Crosses) and a white persecuted underclass (Noughts) still has an eye-opening frisson. Yet, it comes a cropper in Tinuke Craig 's frenetic, over-emphatic revival of Dominic Cooke 's 2007 stage adaptation, which is more interested in making sure we understand the importance of its message than in making us care about the characters. It's like being battered over the head with a strobe light.
The action takes place against Colin Richmond 's urban hellhole of a set, on whose concrete stairs and rusting balconies members of the cast hover throughout like ominous shadows. Here Sephy, the energetic 14-year-old daughter of the deputy prime minister Kamal (a Cross) and Callum, the rougher edged son of her family's former housekeeper (a Nought), tentatively pursue a clandestine relationship, snatching moments on the beach and, when they can, exchanging private notes.
But their relationship is imperilled when Callum's father and brother become involved in a paramilitary terrorist organisation. Blackman's depiction of state-mandated segregation is much more pertinent to previous situations in South Africa and Northern Ireland than to the UK, a country tainted by a more invidious, slippery form of racism. But it does ram home the link between oppression and radicalisation and the pernicious impact of divided loyalties on family dynamics.
Yet Craig's curiously context-free production gives precious little sense of how class and division actually operate. It doesn't help that the dialogue is often ham-fisted: 'Noughts are people just like us,' declares Sephy to her detached, wine-swigging mother, a cardboard cut-out of a depressed politician's wife. But Craig repeatedly ups the ante at the expense of specificity. No one talks when they can shout instead. Callum's mother Meggie (Kate Kordel), put through the wringer by a plot that never lets up, spends most of the time either screaming or wailing.
Most of the supporting characters are poorly sketched, including Kamal, who doesn't so much radiate menace or implacable power as greasy, underwhelming ineptitude. More confusingly, there is often a disconnect between character reactions and the actual plot, which makes such great leaps in time and logic that the audience finds itself struggling to keep up.
This matters in a story that ambitiously posits Callum as an adolescent boy dangerously split between vengeful fury and giddy teenage love. Noah Valentine plays him with a beguiling mix of innocence and truculence but he struggles in a hectic storyline that at times borders on incoherence. And although Corinna Brown gives Sephy a vivacious stage presence, she can't find the weight required to give her relationship with Callum the emotional heft it needs. The more Craig goes for shock and awe, the more she leaves you exhausted and bored. Not a great combination.