Title: Noughts and Crosses
Author: Malorie Blackman and Dominic Cooke
Genre: Drama (play)
Pages: 109

“Noughts and Crosses” is a play we recently read in class. It has a really interesting and suspense building plot, and explains to us how the racial differences affect people all around. Callum’s relationship with Sephy was almost broken, just because of how other people saw them. Callum, a nought, has a white color of skin, and was poor. He was treated badly by the society, got kicked out of school, apparently because he was lowering that school’s reputation. His family went through a lot, including the death of their daughter, Lynette who committed suicide. Sephy, from the other side, came from a rich family, with her father, Kamal Hadley, being the Prime Minister, and her mother, Jasmine Hadley, an alcoholic. She was black, a Cross. And meeting up with Callum was not allowed for her. This line repeated throughout the plot, “… friendship doesn’t exist between a nought and a Cross” (Cooke 87). I think that it was kind  of powerful to hear it almost the whole time, making me think that Callum and Sephy try being best friends, but there was always that barrier that both of them had to cross to get to each other.

What I do not understand from this plot, is that it was set around the 20^th or 21^st century, because those people had really good schools, and objects like phones, and other modern things existed, making it kind of impossible to take in mind the death penalty that Callum experienced at the end of the plot. In most countries, especially the United States, do not rule with a death penalty anymore. So this is what mostly confused me in this story, otherwise I thought it was a pretty well-written play.

I truly recommend this play to students in high school or middle school, because it gets to teach us how not everyone gets accepted in their society, and there isn’t much you can do about it.