Your Total Guide To entertainment

Paul Robeson Play Comes to Swindon

From Carnegie Hall to Swindon Arts Centre. Award-Winning Paul Robeson Play Comes to Swindon, October 24th.

Call Mr. Robeson, an award-winning play which received a standing ovation at New York's Carnegie Hall in February 2012 and was staged in London's West End in October 2013, is to be performed at Swindon Arts Centre on Saturday October 24, 2015, as one of the highlights of Swindon's Black History Month events programme.

This rollercoaster journey through actor/singer Paul Robeson’s remarkable life highlights his pioneering and heroic political activism as well as his music. It features Ol’ Man River and other famous songs, much fiery oratory, and a defiant testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Written and performed by Nigerian-born, Liverpool-based playwright and singer Tayo Aluko with piano accompaniment by Bristol pianist Phil Blandford, Call Mr. Robeson was chosen by The Guardian’s theatre critic Michael Billington as his top pick for things to see in London in January 2011.

It has sold out several other established theatres around the UK, including The Lowry, Belgrade Coventry, Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre, The Bolton Octagon, and Liverpool's Everyman Theatre. All seventeen performances of his recent tour of New Zealand and Australia also completely sold out.

During October 2014, it enjoyed a 4-week residency at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden, where BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends presenter Clive Anderson saw it and later described it as one of the most memorable plays he had seen in 2013.

Among the many awards in the Call Mr. Robeson cabinet, the latest was won at the Atlantic Fringe in Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada in August 2013, where from an international field it was awarded Best Musical Performance. It also won Best Solo Show at the Stratford-upon-Avon Fringe in 2013 and the Argus Angel Award for Artistic Excellence and the Best Male Performer Award at the Brighton Fringe in 2008.