Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Cast: Alice Colquhoun, Dora Colquhoun, Izzie Major.

Guilt is something we should all feel when it comes to realising the further we go in life, the more we perhaps get on in the world, there will always be that despairing inevitability that others, through no fault of their own, will get left behind. Yet that guilt, that sense of responsibility we should feel towards each other as members of the same species is somehow jaded, lost and confused with the idea that giving your time to help another person is somehow to be rewarded and compensated with the freedom to brag and make light of it.

Such is the feeling that reward is based in remuneration rather than just knowing you have made someone feel, even for the barest moment, less invisible, less of being called a migrant for example when the words human in peril is perhaps more an apt phrase that there are those who only seem to want to do good when there is something in it for them. For Colonial Bast**ds, On Charity represents this growing phase of the insincere getting more out of life than what they are prepared to put in and the truth of such deeds, where social equality and capitalist ideals become strange, almost fetish like, bedfellows, is never far away.

For Alice Colquhoun, Dora Colquhoun and Izzie Major, the Colonial Bast**ds hit the target time and time again in this hour long piece at the Unity Theatre. By morphing the every day in which you will find advertising world’s softly spoken allure entrancing you with the dream of helping someone or a group in a far off country but giving you the chance to have the time of your life whilst doing so, or the apparent cleansing feel as you give loose change to a homeless person without looking them in the eye, the three actors gave such a remarkable and entertainingly satirical performance that anyone who finds themselves in the position of being one of these people for whom easy virtue is offset as a profit and loss experience, should look at themselves a little deeper and with distrust.

On Charity may have only been an hour long but it was one of the best hours in which to place yourselves into a truth of life, that life itself does not come free but time is not a commodity to be bartered with, it is there to realise where you are and how you can help others from being swallowed by a system that doesn’t care, with no thought of reward in the process.

An excellent piece of satire and presented with great charm by Colonial Bast**ds.

Ian D. Hall