I’ll be honest. I had low expectations of this show which I feared would be “weird”, esoteric and too loud. I couldn’t have been more wrong. An accessible, passionate – sometimes shocking – piece it moved me to tears as well as making me laugh. And rarely have I seen such tight ensemble work – balletic, energetic (including trampoline in the second act) with choral speaking, monologues and song. Ryan Calais Cameron’s play presents a pretty original, powerful melange.

Six black men unravel their personal stories, experiences, views and ideas. Actors emerge from the group to recall incidents or express feelings while the rest provide a chorus or sometimes represent other characters in an understated Brechtian way.

We hear about a six year old traumatised in the playground because none the girls wants to be caught by a black boy in a game of kiss chase or “miss chase”, learning the hard way that the world doesn’t necessarily agree with his mother that he is black and beautiful.Then there’s the whole question of what you have to do to become  a man – and a dreadful account of beating and abuse within a family. How to do get a girl and how many have you had? Is black skin really sexy or do you prefer it seasoned with white? What is the point of learning black history if it’s all about oppression? How is that empowering? Well don’t forget that Africans once ruled Spain, Portugal and the southern France. This meaty play is nothing like as bitty as any attempt to describe it makes it sound because it’s beautifully directed (Tristan Finn-Aiduenu) with integral music (most of it not “loud”) and movement including some effective slow motion, all of which makes it feel very cohesive.

Inevitably we end with an example of the sort of pointless, tragic atrocity which happens on the streets of London almost every week. And, watching this play, we sit in silent horror and weep at the sheer futility.

In a show with such a talented, accomplished ensemble it is almost insidious to single anyone out. Nonetheless I must mention Emmanuel Akwafo who is both a hilarious comedian and achingly poignant when his character reveals his lack of confidence in trying to build a relationship with a girl. And Kaine Lawrence delights with every curl or the lip, twitch of musculature and word he speaks or sings.

I sat next to a black man who was there alone and had never been to the New Diorama before. I’m pretty sure he was the proud father of one of the cast members but he was coy about admitting that and wouldn’t tell me which one. In the interval he said: “You know, everything in this play really does reflect what happens in the black community. You won’t get it any truer than this.” Well I’m a white woman so this is outside my direct experience on at least two counts but I found it totally, powerfully, absorbingly convincing.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/for-black-boys-who-have-considered-suicide-when-the-hue-gets-too-heavy/

Matthew Hopkins was a self-appointed  “witchfinder”, responsible for the deaths of at least a hundred women in mid-17th Century East Anglia at the time of the English Civil War. Of course it was all presented as righteous Puritanism. In fact he was probably in it for financial gain. His ideas and methods later resurfaced in Massachusetts.

Well, Vickie Donoghue’s play (based on a novel by Beth Underdown) is definitely not The Crucible but it is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. Historically, little is known about Hopkins’s family. The play posits a sister Alice (Lily Knight) who tries and fails to make him see sense and to show compassion. It’s essentially a feminist piece with a cast of five women (one of whom, Jamie-Rose Monk’s Mary, is on his side) and Matthew (George Kemp).

Libby Watson’s set is clever. Lots of shimmery dark panels act as mirrors and add to the murky atmosphere. The wide stage at Queen’s Theatre becomes three different spaces with the aid of Matt Haskins’s lighting design so that scenes flow seamlessly. Doors are flown on and off from above which I thought was ingenious until they began to remind me of lifts going up and down.

I also had a problem with Owen Crouch’s sound design. Almost the entire play is accompanied by loud music and noise which is clearly meant to sound variously creepy, dangerous, frightening and indicative of mental turmoil. For me it quite quickly became an irritant and I pitied the actors who had to speak over it. Although they were all very clear and audible I should think they were pretty tired by the end.

The first act is a bit slow, some of the dialogue wooden and the acting static but it picks up dramatically in the second half when we meet Anne Odeke’s moving Rebecca who agrees to speak for Matthew at a trial in order to save her mother but of course he’s utterly ruthless. The scene in which she is “floated” is beautifully staged.

Kemp is chilling as Matthew and Knight sustains her demanding role as Alice with passion although I’m at a loss to know why she is required to recite The Lord’s Prayer, complete with anachronistic error, quite so many times. Miracle Chance is good as rough and ready but sensitive Grace, the young servant girl detailed to conduct bodily examinations of women for Matthew.

It’s a dark play in every sense. The persecution of these innocent women was/is appalling and it should never be forgotten in these days of “cancel culture” just how easily this mindset takes hold. The names of the women who were killed are, at one point, intoned as part of the soundtrack and they are often mentioned by name in the text. Yes, we should remember them and this play really helps to do that.

This review was first published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-witchfinders-sister/

Image: Daniel Cerqueira, Dona Croll, Hayley Carmichael, John Mackay in CFT’s HOME. Photo: Helen Maybanks

David Storey’s agonisingly poignant play, first seem at the Royal Court in 1970, is set in the garden of what used to be called a mental hospital – although it’s a while before we realise that. When I was growing up, there was such an institution in every area known by name and reputation to all locals. Today, of course, we look after (or not) such patients differently.

My first impression of Sophie Thomas’s set was that, filling the Minerva’s thrust it was pretty. In fact the faded ferns and big downy seed heads (like giant dandelion clocks) about to blow as the light fades at the end of the play is movingly symbolic. Each of the five characters, all of them patients, is faded and finished in some way.

John Mackay as Jack and Daniel Cerqueira as Harry are tidy in collars and ties pretending to be two successful businessmen but conversation goes round in vacuous circles of invention, “Oh yes …” says Harry about fifty times, ever troubled and often weeping. Mackay’s character constantly invents relatives who’ve experienced or achieved interesting things. No one knows the truth about anyone else.

Hayley Carmichael’s Kathleen is a forthright and cackling but pitiful suicide survivor who can’t walk properly because she’s not allowed lace up shoes or a belt. Marjorie (Dona Croll), often acidic, befriends her but has too many troubles of her own to be sympathetic to anyone else.

And poor lobotomised (yes, that was a standard medical procedure at the time) Alfred, played with gutsy sensitivity by Leon Annor is an ex-wrestler who keeps practising weight lifting with the garden furniture and trying to remove it. Even his costume is evocative. Alfred walks about in the garden in stockinged feet –  worn out multicoloured socks through which some of his toes have pushed.

The impressive thing about all this is how the cast, intelligently directed by Josh Roche, bounce off and respond to each other. This must be a difficult script to manage because it’s so repetitive and deliberately banal on the surface over the surging sub texts – but this cast sustain the momentum pretty effectively.

Although some of the dialogue is funny because it’s so inconsequential – characters don’t listen to each other but of course the actors do – this is a deeply serious, uncomfortable play. I think you’d probably need to be in the mood for it. Don’t go if, for any reason, you are feeling unhappy.

Suhayla El-Bushra’s  take on Andrea Levy’s (final) 2010 novel is an arresting account of slavery immediately before and after its abolition in Jamaica. It’s also a celebration of story telling and oral history in which so many narratives are laid one upon another that in the end we have to make up our own mind about truth and what we mean or understand by it.

A youngish black man, Thomas Kinsman (Syrus Lowe) has prospered and bought an estate in Jamaica – perhaps in mid-Nineteenth Century. He finds an elderly black woman named Miss July (Llewella Gideon). He has reason to believe she is the slave mother from whom he was separated in infancy. Eventually, with courtesy and respect (and a lot of food!), he persuades her to tell her story and her bent, dignified feisty figure dominates the stage from them on as she remembers her past.

Enslaved black workers emerge from sugar cane upstage (designer Frankie Bradshaw) amidst atmospheric drum led music and you can feel the heat. Each person is characterised and of course each of them is ready to rebel when the time comes. It’s multifaceted as they, too remember, often recalling things quite different from Miss July’s account. Tara Tijani is strong as the younger Miss July, whose mistress even tries to take her name and insists on calling her “Marguerite” and I enjoyed Cecilia Appiah’s hoity-toity Miss Clara.

Scenes with the white overseer and the owning family are deeply shocking. There’s a fair bit of the sort of colonial language which would have been common currency at the time including the word which is probably now the most offensively emotive in the English speaking world but perhaps the line which stood out for me came from Olive Poulet as Caroline Mortimer: “Don’t kill him. He hasn’t finished my garden”. On press night the audience chuckled and then you could almost hear a collective appalled gasp as they had second thoughts.

It’s a sensitive and very timely contribution in the age of Black Lives Matter. You simply listen, believe and feel horrified shame as you marvel at the warm theatricality of the piece.

There is, however, an audibility issue. Hard as the cast have worked on their diaspora accents with voice coaches the end result is arguably over rich for UK audiences. I missed, for example, about half of what Llewlla Gideon said, powerful as she is in this role. And the thrust stage lay out at Chichester Festival Theatre means that sometimes characters are a long way from some of the audience and facing away from them. However fine the play you can’t respond adequately if you can’t hear much of what’s said – and, for the record, I don’t have a hearing problem.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-long-song/