Deborah Pearson’s playful show is a serious examination of racism and the inadequacies of liberalism

“A theatre is a public space. So is a park. In Deborah Pearson’s play about white accountability, the two become indivisible, an arena that stands in for society itself. On two of the three benches on stage, the word “taken” is stamped. Made Visible – a meta theatre show that is funny, frank and self-aware – constantly questions who holds the space, who has the right to be there and what it means when a white person sits down next to someone with skin of a different colour.

If Deborah (Haley McGee) doesn’t sit on the bench occupied by Ila (Mia Soteriou), is it because she’s racist and doesn’t want to sit next to an Asian woman? If she does, is she merely demonstrating her liberal credentials, not least in the toe-curling way she nods sympathetically as Ila talks? Or is it, as Anjali Mya Chadha’s Ayesha tartly observes, another example of a white person asserting their power by colonising an already taken bench by the duck pond?”