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Know Your Rights.
The Review Page.

As Know Your Rights was part of an evening of short plays - The Seeing Red season at The Red Room - only the parts of the reviews that deal with Judy's play are included.

Noma Dumezweni playing Bonnie.


Ironically, it is precisely the old-fashioned qualities of judy Upton's "Know Your Rights" that makes it so absorbing. A collision on the communal staircase between Frances Cuka's Jane and a small child is a disaster for both Jane and the boy's mother. Switching from Noma Dumezweni's Bonnie to Jane, Upton charts a terrible spiral of decline in which the erosion of the welfare state contributes to both their misfortunes as one woman is set against the other.  Tony Blair might say that these are the issues he's addressing, but Upton makes it clear what a long distance he has to travel.

Jane Edwardes - Time Out 13-20/5/1998.


And so to Judy Upton's "Know Your Rights", a moving and accomplished piece for two chiming monologues where Francis Cuka and Noma Dumezweni play increasingly hostile neighbours fatally entangled in the welfare network. An initial mishap exposes the weaknesses of the legal, social, unemployment and medical systems, on the pattern of the old ballad "For want of a horseshoe nail" until finally, the battle for survival is lost.  Using precisely detailed situations that give the actresses material for their revealing performances, Upton's play can dispense with arguments and right-on statements because in creating characters she develops situation.

Jeremy Kingston - The Times


...but it plays well, as does Judy Upton's "Know Your Rights" - two intercut monologues in which a litigious snooper (Frances Cuka) brings a black single parent (Noma Dumezweni) to the verge of ruin by enlisting in the war on benefit fraud. That makes a real point: that Labour, in seeking to curb welfare abuse, may have opened the door to vindictive busybodies.

Michael Billington - The Guardian

The Review Pages:
[Everlasting Rose] [Ashes and Sand] [Temple] [The Shorewatchers' House] [Bruises] [Stealing Souls]
[Sunspots] [People on the River] [To Blusher with Love] [The Girlz] [Know Your Rights] [Confidence]
[The Ballad of a Thin Man] [Sliding with Suzanne]


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