A Noughts & Crosses staging misses the moment

Noughts & Crosses, published in 2001, is an inventive work of counterfactual fiction: asking young readers to imagine a reality in which black people – the “crosses” – are the ruling class and white “noughts” the persecuted minority. Dominic Cooke’s script, adapted in 2007, is faithful to a fault, following star-crossed sweethearts Callum (a nought, or “blanker”, as they are derogatively known) and Sephy (a cross) as they navigate a love sprung from hate: stealing kisses on a private beach, sending notes, throwing stones at bedroom windows.

Both are bullied by their school peers, but it is Callum, of course, who bears the relentless blows of structural racism and abuse – until he can bear them no more. After the death of his sister – who kills herself after an attack by a nought gang over her interracial relationship – there follows a trail of devastation leading, with tragic inevitability, to Callum’s recruitment to the terrorist Liberation Militia: a bomb is set, a hostage taken. A noose hangs ominously at the top of the towering set – an industrial structure rising up through the woodland idyll, suggesting there is ugliness everywhere.

What a daring moment to stage a show about a marginalised white boy being radicalised. Yet the production doesn’t seem to dare consider the parallels. Other contemporary issues are also underexplored: police brutality or collusion, for example; a line about a diversity scheme being shut down now warrants more than a passing mention.

Understandably, there’s a desire to stick to the syllabus: Noughts & Crosses is taught at key stage 3 and this is an admirable effort by Tinuke Craig, Regent Park’s new associate artistic director, to attract a teenage audience largely underserved by theatre programming. There is much for them to chew on in this lively love story, but the approach is BBC Bitesize: educational, episodic, a little too prescriptive and explicit. After all, young people are increasingly literate in the more insidious, subtle forms of racism: if there are micro-aggressions here for them to decipher, they are obscured by the macro.

The characters are neatly drawn and acted, though certain ambiguities might again have been better teased out: Corinna Brown, persuasively girlish as Sephy, is earnest and entirely endearing, but a hint of righteousness or a self-serving saviourism might have tempered the wide-eyed naivety.

She has chemistry with Noah Valentine’s Callum, who transforms malevolently into an unrecognisable fanatic, voice hardening as he goes. But, as in the book, he is too easily forgiven. Callum’s father is unconflicted; Sephy’s is an uninspiring villain. Alec Boaden is robust as Callum’s belligerent brother, Jude, roaming in the ring like a bull terrier in a dog fight, pinned by the morbid gaze of the entire cast, who are dotted around the stage for the duration for the duration. They play judge, jury and executioner – literally – in a clever piece of surveillance staging.

The BBC’s 2020 TV adaptation experimented in sharp, vibrant ways with subversive Afrofuturist design and costume; here, all is sparse and monochromatic, with a few intriguing details: Sephy wears nought-shape puffs at the ends of her braids and tiles on the floor form noughts-and-crosses grids.

Unlike the script, the setting invites us to fill in the blanks, and bring the real world in: tender scenes on the beach are enhanced by the sound of the wind rustling in the trees like lapping waves. When all turns dark, prophetic police sirens wail from the road outside. In such moments there is colour aplenty, amid all this black and white.

Noughts & Crosses runs at Regent’s Park Open-Air theatre until 26 July

Photograph by Manuel Harlan