Review: Noughts and Crosses, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre

But while director Tinuke Craig and movement director Ingrid Mackinnon create tense, pacy storytelling, they are let down by Dominic Cooke’s clunky adaptation, which teeters into melodrama.

It’s a shame because Corinna Brown (Heartstopper) and Noah Valentine (Waterloo Road) make a poignant pair of star crossed lovers in a flipped world where dark skinned Crosses are privileged and white skinned noughts systemically oppressed by a brutal state.

Malorie Blackman’s YA bestseller is set in a dystopian Britain where black skinned people are privileged and white skinned people are oppressed. (Image: Manuel Harlan) Blackman’s novel raises issues of segregated schooling, a stacked judicial system and armed struggle, which carries echoes of Apartheid, Jim Crow-era America and The Troubles.

But personal relationships are sometimes sacrificed to the teaching moment – not least in the soapy, unsubtle depiction of Callum’s working class family.

Colin Richmond’s brutalist multi-level industrial set offers a striking backdrop to a world which will crush the blossoming love between Brown’s petulant but optimistic Sephy, and Valentine’s increasingly angry Callum.

Corinna Brown plays Sephy, the daughter of the deputy Prime Minister, while Noah Valentine is promising student Callum who endures family tragedy and imprisonment. (Image: Manuel Harlan) We meet them as young teens, snatching a stolen kiss on a beach, but by Act II, as the sky over Regent’s Park darkens, so does the story.

A suicide, a bomb and a prison death lead Callum to join a liberation movement and and an act of betrayal.

Aided by DJ Walde’s beat-heavy soundtrack, Mackinnon stages terrific fights and marshals a background cast to create a believable world where noughts lurk fearfully in the shadows while Crosses stride around confidently. 

There are thought-provoking strands here about state oppression, checking your privilege, and young people drawn into terrorism, and while the ending is bleak, that’s meat and drink to teens raised on The Hunger Games.

My teen was gripped from start to finish, even if I felt a better script might have fleshed out these across-the-divide lovers and the emotion behind their predicament.

Noughts and Crosses runs at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre until July 26.