Noughts & Crosses at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre
Malorie Blackman’s 2001 novel Noughts & Crosses is a seminal young adult classic. Interrogating racial and class hierarchies through its dystopian inversion of power, Blackman creates an alternate society where Black people (Crosses) dominate and white people (Noughts) are systematically oppressed, the stakes of resisting the ruling class as high as they are in the real world. This production, adapted by Dominic Cooke and directed by Tinuke Craig, makes this tension inescapable under the open skies of London’s Regent’s Park, where even the smallest of interactions – a glance, shared laughter, a hug – carry the threat of impending violence.
Driving the story’s plot is the Romeo and Juliet-esque love story between childhood friends Sephy (Corinna Brown), a Cross and daughter of a wealthy politician, and Callum (Noah Valentine), a bright but poverty-stricken Nought who receives a scholarship to her prestigious Cross-majority school. Soon caught in the motions of forbidden love – stolen kisses, hidden meetings, sneaking around – the danger is all too real to be exciting. When Callum and the other Nought students face daily discrimination at school, banished to their segregated table, Sephy’s public defence backfires as her Cross peers brand her a race-traitor, while the Noughts distrust her allyship.
Brown brings a guileless charm to a Sephy clinging on to the idea of a colourblind romance, her intentions well-meaning, and her eyes slowly open to her own privilege. Meanwhile, Callum is already exhausted by a reality Sephy’s only starting to understand. With each fresh injustice against his family, he struggles to separate her from the systems she represents. Valentine delivers a deeply moving performance as Callum, a boy whose love for Sephy and rage against oppression wage constant war inside him.
Colin Richmond’s brutalist set and costume design only heightens this push-pull tension between the star-crossed lovers. Its menacing, concrete structures, rusting with systemic decay, enforce the divide: Noughts in tattered, dull tracksuits, relegated to lower levels, Crosses in expensive tailoring occupying the upper structures. The ensemble cast silently hover around the stage like surveillance cameras, making sure their love heads towards tragedy the way their world demands it to.
Characters here aren’t just victims of circumstance. Between Callum’s hot-headed brother Jude (Alec Boaden), whose anger at his oppressed status manifests outward in violent resistance, and his emotionally fragile sister Lynette (Chanel Waddock), whose pain fatefully turns inward, the Noughts assert agency in the only ways they can.
Tinuke Craig’s swift transitions – from school to courtroom, but most pointedly between Sephy’s and Callum’s homes – are cleverly revealing. Where Sephy’s family home struggles under private crises (alcoholism, marital breakdown), Callum’s is facing institutional violence – state-sanctioned executions, wrongful imprisonment. But even more striking are the news segments aggressively interrupting into scenes throughout the play. The stage suddenly fills with blue television light every time Helena Pipe’s Reporter bursts on, her presence brief but absorbing, a physical reminder of how politics saturate their daily lives – just in very different ways.
Though powerfully staged, the script at times over-explains its themes, constantly spelling out its messages about power dynamics instead of letting scenes speak for themselves. It weakens emotional impact by underestimating the audience’s ability to piece things together. These moments threaten to drown out the central love story, the political commentary too didactic for its adult audiences and too heavy-handed for young adult ones.
This timely production wears no rose-tinted glasses, just as Blackman does not shy away from highlighting the complexities and consequences of our real-world power structures. Where in it, oppression breeds resistance, to hope is to make a conscious choice to resist, and to love is to resist against structures that seek to control it.
Ruweyda Sheik Ali
Photos: Manuel Harlan
Noughts & Crosses is at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre from 28th June until 26th July 2025. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.
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