The 2016 election of Trump to the White House frightened a lot of people. The actor Alia Collins-Friedrichs recalls being awake all night and crying.
But then, on 21 January 2017, something unexpected happened in London. By social media and word of mouth, a march against Trump of a reported hundred thousand was mobilised. Even those who initiated the event were surprised at the numbers who turned up.
Liminal Theatre gives us a glimpse of a day that made many people feel safer.
The memories of Beth Pollard and Alia who went to the protest are interspersed with brief scenes that remind us of reasons others were there.
A woman stands before a mirror, her life being a series of demands on her appearance that are always replaced by other demands about shape, size etc till she is lost and defeated.
On the wall of the performance area hang Amnesty posters declaring “Women’s Rights are Human Rights”. Other signs refer to pay inequality and sexual abuse. A woman says she objects to the continued illegality of abortion in Northern Ireland.
Alia and Beth recall the excitement of finding the demo, of seeing someone wearing a pussy hat and the mass of homemade posters. And the audience get to add their own posters written on paper given to them as they arrive at the show. Some of them are read out to the audience.
The March is a fast thirty-five-minute entertaining testimony to an important day of international solidarity that made Trump decide to put the UK much further down the list of countries he felt it safe to visit.