PLAY REVIEW: Blue/Orange ★★★

Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange, first staged 25 years ago, lands at Greenwich Theatre with renewed urgency. In a time when conversations around mental health, race, and institutional authority are as raw as ever, this revival – directed with clarity by James Haddrell – doesn’t just revisit the debate, it reignites it.

Set in a sparse NHS consulting room, the play revolves around Christopher (Matthew Morrison), a young Black man on the cusp of discharge, and two doctors who fiercely disagree on his diagnosis. Morrison is magnetic – fragile one moment, ferociously lucid the next – constantly keeping the audience on edge. His performance resists easy sympathy, and is all the more affecting for it.

John Michie is chillingly effective as Dr Smith, the senior consultant whose motives – academic ambition, racial bias, or simply pragmatism – remain unsettlingly murky. Opposite him, Rhianne Barreto’s Dr Farooqui brings a fresh dynamic as a South Asian trainee, subtly shifting the play’s racial and gendered power structures. Though some of her early scenes feel underpowered, she grows into the role with poise and emotional precision.

Jana Lakatos’s design is suitably clinical, while Henry Slater’s lighting casts a cold glare on the institutional detachment at the heart of the play. At times the script’s circular arguments risk losing momentum, but Penhall’s writing remains sharply incisive.