BBC Radio 3, 13 March 2010
This remarkable series of monologues focusing on the experience of an
African-Caribbean British family, was performed by just one actor - Nadine Marshall.
The plot was fairly straightforward - a family leads an ordinary life, doing much
the same things every day like getting up, eating breakfast, going to work, eating lunch and so on. However such rituals do
not seem to have much meaning, except as a means of imposing order on an increasingly random existence. If they were taken
away, then the family would be both physically and emotionally lost.
One day this is precisely what happens: the brother is stabbed to death as a result
of an altercation, and both the mother and sister struggle to come to terms with the event. Such things are not supposed to
happen; they are only usually reported in the newspapers. The sister describes in graphic detail her brother's wounds, almost
as if she were a police surgeon in Silent Witness; and cannot abide any of her so-called workmates' insincere expressions
of condolence. Meanwhile the mother tries to deny the fact of her son's death through repetition of cliched phrases, yearning
instead for a return to 'normality' (understood, in this sense, as a return to life's daily rituals). Yet this will never
happen Random ends with the sister looking round her brother's bedroom, touching his bed and looking at the boyish
posters on the walls. Life's randomness has clearly dealt her family a dud hand.
This raw, powerful drama, first performed at London's Royal Court Theatre, was directed
by the author.
