Entering the Burton Taylor Studio to be greeted by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers slumped on a stark white chair against a backdrop of family pictures, it becomes clear that John Livesey’s adaptation of Debbie Tucker Green’s Random is not your typical Oxford Am-Dram production. Staging a one-woman play that tackles the sensitive yet urgent topic of knife crime, alongside a landscape of race, gender, and familial relationships, is certainly ambitious. However, the astuteness of every cast and crew member makes the production a sleekly emotional triumph.

There are very few plays that could sustain such an electric connection with the audience for fifty minutes without interval. Gazelle Mba’s minimalistic set design forms an intelligently understated symbol for the construction and destruction of family life. The addition of a microphone to the set after the crux of the plot transforms the speech of the sister into a court testimony, unsettling any previous domestic warmth. As Amewudah-Rivers entangles herself in the cord of this stark prop, she wraps herself in the memory of all those affected by the social uncertainty that warrants the line, ‘Death used to be for the old’. Furthermore, the precision of the lighting orchestrated by Linette Chan plays an integral role in separating both the multiple characters, and the time scale of the play, so that fifty minutes becomes a series of days.

Amewudah-Rivers’ acting is nuanced and fresh. Her performance is peppered with perfect comic timing in the first half of the play, an impressive feat considering Random’s emotional depth. Her portrayal of grief, heartbreak, and the dissolution of family roles are professional and clean. Not one word of Tucker Green’s script is wasted. The immense challenge of flipping between the characters of mother, sister, father, and brother could have easily descended into disorientation if approached by a less capable performer, but the standing ovation on the opening night is testament to her talent. The sharpness of the distinction between characters is achieved through an intoxicating blend of vocal contortion, Chan’s fluidity of lighting, and Mba’s raw set design.

Particularly extraordinary, however, is Amewudah-Rivers’ physicality. As she walks across the stage, so do we as an audience traipse to school, to work, to the butcher. The stooped back of the mother reflects a life defined by working hard and giving love, just as the military posture of the father gives gravity to the stock character of the man as the head of the house. The realignment of family positions in the aftermath of the death of a son was questioned through this physical characterisation. Amewudah-Rivers’ command meant there was not a single area of the stage that escaped becoming complicit in the performance. It would be a further challenge to her ability (and immensely intriguing if nothing else) to see the production transposed into a bigger space. The power and vulnerability her presence can evoke indicates that the intimacy required of Random would not be lost, and the impact of the play, with the chilling line “It’s already way too late,” would potentially resonate further.

With just one cast member, no intervals, and an intimate performance space, every element of Random has to flow, to avoid a staccato sense that would detract from the impact Tucker Green intended for her words. The seamless harmony between the direction, production, set design, lighting, and acting goes further than this – the script is elevated so that even as we understand it to be fiction, we cannot escape the wider context of the reality of random violence in an uncertain world.

Not all plays come across well on the page, but from the first time I read it I have found Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden electrifying. Dorfman’s play asks the difficult questions about what happens, what should happen, and what could happen otherwise, in the wake of revolution. With its cast of three and single location until the final scene, it renders these broad questions stifingly, claustrophobically personal, and I would love one day to feel the full effects of this in a staged performance.

Dorfman shows us the slower, limited, bureaucratic side of revolution, the story grounded inescapably in time and place. The play is set in an unnamed South American country, closely based on Chile, in the wake of a revolution that has replaced a totalitarian regime with a fledgling democracy.

The characters each speak to more than a single person’s experience: from Paulina, who saved lives during the regime by smuggling people out of the country, and was caught, tortured and raped; to her husband Gerardo, who did the same but wasn’t caught, and now works for the new government; to Roberto, a newcomer whom Paulina identifies as her torturer. These characters form a powerful kind of synecdoche throughout the play for the conflicts and uncomfortable coexistences that are being played out throughout the nation. This is not to say that they are allegories, and indeed it is their specific, personal experiences that are foregrounded: they are representatives of wider groups, not representations of something other than themselves.

We see in rawly individual ways how the rhetoric of compromise – arguably crucial in saving the young democracy from the lurking threat of the disempowered old order – becomes oppressive. As Paulina declares, acknowledging the shared nature of her experience with a plural pronoun, ‘We’re going to suffocate from so much equanimity.’

Gerardo, heading a commission to investigate the crimes of the old regime, explains that ‘the commission is not supposed to identify the authors of crimes.’ Running scared, he places the healing of the nation as an abstract whole and political entity before that of individual victims (including his wife) without a second thought, accepting on their behalf that they will never receive justice. We see this dynamic patterned throughout, as he continually makes decisions that affect Paulina without consulting her, such as taking on the commission, and inviting Roberto to stay the night at their house, insisting, ‘Paulina will be delighted.’ He tells her, ‘You’re still a prisoner, you stayed there behind with them, locked in that basement,’ using her trauma as evidence of her irrationality, and therefore his mandate, as the ‘rational’ one, to make decisions for the both of them. He treats her trauma as a sign of the need for her to ‘move on’ (by accepting that she will never receive justice), rather than as a real problem that this new society should be addressing.

The way in which Dorfman builds this dynamic, and then introduces Roberto as a catalyst for the explosion of tensions between the couple, must be incredible to watch played out on stage. The cracks in Gerardo’s self-image as the embodiment of moderation and fairness begin to show, as Paulina points out the inherent injustice of his tiptoeing adherence to due process: ‘And why does it always have to be people like me who have to sacrifice, why are we always the ones to make concessions?’

This, truly, is the problem that drives the play. In its desire for self preservation, the new government fails to use its institutions to protect and support its citizens. In Death and the Maiden we watch the pursuit of vengeance, but only because the pursuit of justice is rendered impossible. Through its confinement to the intimately, excruciatingly personal, Death and the Maiden plays out with chilling clarity the implications of the political, particularly in terms of what comes next after revolution.