Stay Happy, Keep Smiling
at 53two, Manchester
Reviewed by Matthew Dougall October 2017
Presented by Manchester Actors' Platform, and directed by MAP's founding director Simon Naylor, this is a piece of theatre that will stay with me for a long time.
The play is an amalgam of 5 separate stories seemingly unconnected apart from one simple, but shocking and life-changing thing. They are all eye-witnesses to a brutal murder by an assumed Isis terrorist of a soldier on the street near where they all live. And although the terrorist's actions didn't touch them physically, this play deals with the emotional response and recoil that witnessing the event has on them. How they are forever changed by it and how they try and cope with the vision and knowledge of it, and how those they love and those they live with try and understand too.