Make black lives, not just black plagues, matter on stage

When it comes to theater, the pandemic has been a paradox, reducing life to lockdown bubbles and at the same time broadening horizons. When you can stream plays from Europe as easily as from Brooklyn, the world feels more interconnected than it once was bound by human bonds.

But also by links of inhumanity, as shown by two recent pieces from London. Typical, by Ryan Calais Cameron, is based on the case of Christopher Alder, a British Nigerian who died in police custody in 1998. His brutal strength underscores the universality of racist violence. Anthem, by Lolita Chakrabarti, is a more subtle and sought-after look at the tragedies that plague black men who see racism as the least of their problems.

Both are striking, although the take differs. Typical of the Soho theater, starts with an alarm clock ringing and continues ringing for 60 minutes. Not that you understood, at first, the nature of his warning. When we meet him, Alder didn’t name any names in the play but is vividly embodied by British actor, television host and rapper Richard Blackwood is in a happy mood, getting dressed and getting ready for an evening of dancing and drinking.

Like many pieces for one man, Typical is a continuous interior monologue; the character of Alder recounts his day as if he was keeping a minute-by-minute journal in lightly rhymed and animated verses. Jump on the jump rope, he said, deciding not to exercise. Stand on the mat sit / step over those weights waiting in hope.

The relentless ticktock of rhythm has a double duty: to maintain dramatic tension while dramatizing the suppression of the characters. Hints of trouble with his ex-wife, sons, finances, and the world can’t match the pace of his inner music.

This is all an invention; no one probably knows what the real Alder, 37, a Falklands War veteran, was doing in the hours leading up to his release that night. But the form of what follows is correct. After an altercation outside a club, Alder finds himself in custody, unresponsive on the floor of a police station with a pool of blood forming in his mouth. White officers do not attempt resuscitation until it is too late; instead, as a tape recording will prove laterd, they laugh and make monkey sounds as he dies.

In England, none of this would be a spoiler; the case is as infamous as that of George Floyd. The goal of Camerons is not just to tell it but, as the title suggests, to turn Alder into an Everyman whose fate could be that of any Black in Britain on any average day. . The tragedy is systemic, as the actual conclusion of the story demonstrates: officers were acquitted of manslaughter charges.

The austere staging of Anastasia Osei-Kuffour emphasizes the universality of the problem by minimizing visual details. Expressionist light and sound take over and give the room the frightening interiority and propulsion of a nightmare. It makes sense; Cameron wrote the first draft in a single stroke from 9 p.m. to 10 the next morning, after being harassed and intimidated by the police For the umpteenth time. In his mind, he said, was this desperate question: is it possible that I could become a man?

The same question torments Gus and Benny, the fictional characters who come to life in Chakrabartis Hymn. Although both are of Jamaican descent, the similarity seems to end there. Gus (the West End star Adrian lester) comes from a solidly bourgeois background, but, in her late twenties, had entrepreneurial dreams far beyond her family’s dry cleaning and stationery stores.

Also approaching 50, Benny (Danny Sapani, from Killing Eve) had a more difficult climb. After a childhood spent commuting between foster care and his unstable single mother, he only recently began to realize for his three children the stability he lacked.

But even this stability is fragile, partly built on the emptiness where his unknown father should be. That, and the fact that he and Gus meet at Guss’s stern and disapproving father’s funeral, quickly indicates where the story goes. The two men turn out to be half-brothers, half-complete, one with the other or without the other.

At first defensive and prickly, Gus and Benny gradually bond over the course of a year through sport, entrepreneurship and especially music. Explode old movements on songs from their youth Lean over me, Gettin Jiggy Wit It and many others, they almost come to feel like family. Nevertheless, the theme of failure and absence passes under the happiest passages, a counter-melody which hints at the disaster to come.

Chakrabarti does not specifically link this theme or this catastrophe to racism. When a white woman rolls her car window because she’s afraid Gus will attack her, or when Benny is kicked out of a pub for questionable reasons, they do little. Microaggressions are only part of the irritating fabric of their daily life: small inconveniences like bad weather or a bunion.

But Blanche McIntyres beautifully performed production for the Almeida theater Dwells on moments like this just long enough to make you wonder, as the story heads to its inevitable, symmetrical conclusion, how much of what happens to Gus and Benny is in their control. Racism is part of this story; parenthood is another. Gus lived with his father and Benny did not live, but both were injured by him.

The play on words built into the title gets this double right: Hymn is a singing celebration but also an accusation. This makes it, like Typical, an important addition to the literature of pieces inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. In different ways, they demonstrate what matter means, giving us Alder and men like him as they were before they were erased, with all their weaknesses, passions, and promises.

Is the focus on what is lost a particularly English point of view? If so, I’m grateful that streaming brought it here. American plays on similar topics Cameron says he wrote Typical in part in response to Antoinette Nwandus Pass Over which deals mainly with the racism machine itself, how it’s oiled up, and how it crushes. Typical and Hymn show us something different, complementary, and necessary: ​​that black men are complicated in ways that political analysis cannot always capture. They are much more than their death.

Anthem
From March 3 to 9; almeida.co.uk

Typical
Until March 31: sohotheatreondemand.com