Lyrical and loosely structured, Sam Selvon’s 1956 British Caribbean novel doesn’t readily lend itself to the stage. It’s also a difficult proposition to deliver his “huge metropolis” story to life in an area as cosy as this subterranean venue.
So the facility of this manufacturing, tailored by Roy Williams and directed by Ebenezer Bamgboye, is all of the extra startling. Selvon’s sprawling story about Windrush-era arrivals in London is given a small-scale expressionist remedy with a solid of seven sitting throughout the stage, postcodes flashing up in a glare of lights. The stripping down is counterintuitive however impressed.
We observe a posse of outsider immigrants, who come to the “mom nation” to grasp they aren’t welcome. There may be the unemployed, despairing Lewis (Tobi Bakare), newcomer Galahad (Romario Simpson), the determined Huge Metropolis (Gilbert Kyem Jr) and the unhappy, central voice of Moses (Gamba Cole). Their camaraderie and loneliness are piercingly evoked.
There may be additionally the fantastically haughty Tanty (Carol Moses), Lewis’s spouse Agnes (Shannon Hayes) and Christina (Aimee Powell), a haunting from Moses’s previous. The feminine characters are vivid however peripheral as a result of that is actually a research of Black masculinity, together with its poisonous results on the ladies within the males’s lives, and it looks like a miniature companion piece to Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys Who Have Thought of Suicide When the Hue Will get Too Heavy.
Williams offers Selvon’s rambling construction a tighter form and characters converse in monologues, generally dealing with as much as hostile invisible forces. It’s not all the time clear to whom characters are talking if in case you have not learn the guide, nevertheless it doesn’t matter as a result of their phrases carry immense drama.
Typically there’s sultry track (by Powell, who has a wealthy, honeyed voice), and characters converse in opposition to the strum of a guitar, skitter of drums or extra jagged sounds, thrillingly designed by Tony Gayle. The theatricality is barely overplayed within the motion (from slo-mo to bounce) however the place this may need grow to be too stiffly stylised, it provides to the sense of emotional storytelling. Lights and music are used to accentuate the story’s psychological undercurrents.
There may be little of the comedy we see within the Windrush-era musical The Huge Life, at present revived at Theatre Royal Stratford East, however the identical sense of radical pleasure within the characters’ lives, from Agnes and Tanty’s dancing to the banter and horseplay between the lads.
The solid are great, capturing the hope, innocence and betrayals of immigrant life. Every actor makes their character actual and likable, however with no trace of sentimentality. There are lots of searing moments, from the painful approach through which Agnes and Lewis’s relationship turns abusive to Galahad, overwhelmed and bloodied, seeing himself as Black as if for the primary time.
Each aspect of the present hypnotises, capturing the pained romance of town, and these lonely Londoners in it.
