Wake up people! Conspiracy play comes to the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch.

Well let’s give the Queen’s Theatre a round of applause!  “Blueprint”, their innovative and ambitious festival featuring writers and creators from our local area, started last week and goes on until next Saturday.
The Havering Daily went to see ‘Wake Up People’ by Thurrock born writer John Webber. This fusion of 1984, David Icke’s conspiracy theories and the Anti Vaxxer protests certainly left people thinking and sadly, highlights the divisions and rifts caused in families by the pandemic and its’ remedy.
We meet Stacey, a divorced mum, living in a flat in Grays, working as a receptionist for a local paper; she has been on a boozy night out with the paper’s accountant Ash. Stacey and Ash are just getting to the romantic part of the evening when they discover Pauline, Stacey’s mum has been in the flat all the time having got her dates mixed up!
During the conversation we discover Pauline has been in regular contact with Barry, Stacey’s ex husband and is following his You Tube programmes on Flat Earth and the conspiracy theories of David Icke, complete with lizard people! Stacey is very unhappy, especially as it is her daughters’ 18th birthday very soon and she wants it to be a memorable occasion. 
Sadly the birthday party is memorable, but for all the wrong reasons! Stacey loses her job, her daughter suffers depression, Pauline becomes even more radicalised by conspiracy theories and Barry, having moved to Wales and become more extreme in his views, gets arrested. Wake up people is certainly the mantra here.
This is a powerful and moving work in progress which highlights how deep and sad life has become since the pandemic began. The work is cleverly staged using You Tube type channel voices – rather akin to 1984 – and actors read from scripts on stage with a Narrator. This would certainly be a piece that transfers to the west end. John Webber has caught the atmosphere of a family in troubled times.
Laura Doddington portrayed Stacey to perfection with Eve Matheson capturing all the pathos of a mother and grandmother in Pauline. David Tarkenter and Jacoba Williams played the on line voices with frightening reality.

The “Blueprint” festival continues this week with some exciting new works and includes This Story Is True For Most Of Us by local artist/writer David Shearing. Be bold and try something completely different at our local theatre, you will be pleasantly surprised as well as entertained!