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Elizabeth Newman – Pitlochry Festival Theatre's 2019 Season

Elizabeth Newman is in love. This is the impression the dynamic new artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre gives on the eve of her inaugural season opening with her production of Summer Holiday. As opening statements go, the musical stage version of the classic teen travelogue Brit-flick will undoubtedly be a feel-good extravaganza. Coming at a time when international travel looks set to be restricted, the show’s depiction of carefree youth in transit has other underlying resonances. “Summer Holiday is a story about young people falling in love and being able to go wherever they want,” says Newman. “It’s a story about how wonderful it is to be connected. With everything that’s going on in the world just now, all of that is becoming harder, and this show is celebrating how joyful it is to be able to be that carefree.” Newman and her team currently have four of PFT’s summer season of six shows in rehearsal, utilising an ensemble of seventeen actors. The plays include No

Shine

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It's a long way from Zambia to Newcastle for Kema Sikazwe, aka Kema Kay, the UK raised rapper turned actor, whose profile has been very much on the upturn since his appearance in Ken Loach's era defining film, I, Daniel Blake. As he tells it over an hour of autobiographical storytelling peppered with his own songs, Sikazwe arrives in the rough and tumble of one of Tyneside's less salubrious areas aged three. From here he is thrown into the deep end of playground bullying and everyday racism until he discovers a music to call his own as a survival mechanism to weather the storm. Despite the show's title, taken from the Zambian meaning of Sikazwe's name, there is light and shade aplenty in his story, told in a dynamic but engagingly gentle manner in Graeme Thompson's production for Live Theatre Newcastle. Using a pair of microphones set against patterns of ever-pulsating neon strip lights on Emma Bailey's set,

Kema Sikazwe – Shine

Kema Sikazwe didn’t know what he was getting himself into when he was cast in Ken Loach’s film, I, Daniel Blake. The Zambian born rapper had grown up in a rough part of Newcastle wanting to be an actor, but when he went for an audition had presumed he was going to be working as an extra. As it turned out, he was asked to improvise with another performer, and ended up being cast as China, the title character’s neighbour. It was a small but crucial role in Loach’s unflinching polemic on austerity culture and the indignities of the UK’s benefit system. For Sikazwe, whose main focus up until then had been music, it changed everything. “It was huge for me,” he says in a gentle Geordie burr. “I was getting stopped on the street and getting recognised. Being a kid on a council estate you can feel like one of the forgotten people, but suddenly, getting that amount of recognition, it’s crazy.” How Sikazwe got there is told in Shine, his autobiographical solo show which arrives in Edinb