The final book club of 2015 read random (2008), a short, moving poetic play by young black British playwright, debbie tucker green. As well as wanting to coincide with the forthcoming debbie tucker green symposium – http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/campuslife/whatson/eventsconferences/debbietuckergreen.html –  I was also keen to introduce an exciting new playwright who I suspected the readers wouldn’t have come across before.

In random, a single actress (originally played at the Royal Court Theatre by Nadine Marshall) performs multiple roles: sister, brother, mother and father, and for much of the time speaks directly to the audience. It starts off as an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary black family in London, but half way through it becomes clear that the brother, a teenage schoolboy, has been fatally stabbed in a random attack. The rest of the performance conveys the thoughts, feelings and emotions of the remaining family members, as they are informed of brother’s death by the police, visit the site where he was stabbed, and go to the morgue to identify his body.

Initially there was a mixed response to the play: many readers were moved by it, felt connected to the characters and thought that the experience of grief was related in a way that had universal applicability. But a few readers disliked reading a play with such upsetting subject matter, and one reader found it difficult to understand the language, which in places uses street patois.

All readers seemed to enjoy watching youtube clips of scenes of various performances of random and discovered a new appreciation of the peculiarly beautiful poetry and rhythm of debbie tucker green’s language. They also commented on the manner in which actresses mediated the language in ways they didn’t expect. This led to an interesting discussion about the multiple interpretative possibilities of play texts.

Readers also enjoyed having PhD student, Jessica Day, present for the discussion and an interesting cross-generational conversation about language use seemed to arise as a result of Jess’s presence.

In the end, while all readers admitted that they wouldn’t have chosen this play to read themselves, most were happy to have read it and would be interested in seeing a play by debbie tucker green if one was staged in Lincoln.

Dr Siân Adiseshiah