By Grace Hatchell
Right then, I’ve shaken the envelopes, checked for loose glitter and one suspicious biscuit crumb, and I can confirm there’s a fresh delivery from Birmingham tucked neatly inside this week’s satchel.
For Their Safety
Written & Directed by Abhishek Passi
Blue Orange Theatre, Birmingham
7 March, 7pm
Landing at the Blue Orange Theatre this March is a new short script-in-hand stage play that trades spectacle for observation. No grand set pieces, no dramatic chase scenes across the stage. Instead, it plants you somewhere far more recognisable… a British park.
The play begins with an ordinary conversation. The kind you’d hear while sitting on a bench minding your own business but absolutely listening anyway. At first, everything sounds polite and harmless. Then the tone shifts, ever so slightly. A joke hesitates. A pause stretches. Words start doing more work than they were meant to.
For Their Safety explores modern anxieties around safety, responsibility and public space, not through a single shocking incident but through language and behaviour. The tension comes from how people speak, how they stop speaking, and what they imply without ever quite saying it. Humour, hesitation and perception quietly reveal deeper worries about protection and how society presents itself, especially when thinking about the world people are growing up into.
Running approximately 25–30 minutes, the production leans on intimate staging and close character interaction. The performances are restrained and conversational, allowing small remarks to land with surprising emotional weight. You’re not watching a big dramatic event unfold. You’re watching an everyday moment slowly tighten, and that makes it all the more unsettling.
The cast features Collette Jay as Dovil, Maisie Frater as Dorota and Myla J as Emma, circling one another in a conversation where every pause matters as much as every line.
Writer-director Abhishek Passi previously directed Never Tell Me The Odds at London’s Old Red Lion Theatre and continues to create socially responsive theatre, engaging contemporary questions through minimal staging and psychologically grounded performance.
So if you fancy theatre that whispers rather than shouts and leaves you thinking about it on the journey home, this might be one to post straight into your diary before it slips away.
Blue Orange Theatre, Birmingham
7 March, 7pm
Tickets available via the Blue Orange Theatre website. I’ve stamped this one “worth opening carefully.” Some shows entertain you for an evening. Others linger like a conversation you realise you’re still replaying the next morning.
Tickets: https://blueorangetheatre.co.uk/project/for-their-safety-7th-march/
I’ll be keeping an eye on this one. Some shows entertain you. Others follow you home. This feels like the second sort, and I suspect it will linger longer than the walk back from the park.
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