The Brown Ranger – Chichester Festival Theatre, The Nest
Power Rangers is an American media franchise which originated in Japan in 1993. It proposes the recruitment of a team of sassy, teenagers to fight super-human powers. Each “ranger” wears a distinctive colour coded uniform. But there isn’t a brown one and young, mixedrace Thomas (Ben Grant, who also wrote the piece), obsessed with Power Rangers, imagines himself as the Brown Ranger.
Thus, we start in the midst of a child’s imaginative game, gradually moving to an account of the racism and issues Thomas contends with as he grows up. Grant is an accomplished and engaging actor He’s good at the gamey, imitative gesturing at the beginning as well as getting inside a troubled, puzzled child. And at the end he’s…
