Theatre Reviews: Misty and Sylvia

Are you a blood cell or a virus? According to Arinzé Kene’s mercurial firecracker of a show, you are one or the other. You are either the passengers on a night bus — blood cells — or that hunched figure, trousers slung low, head shrouded in hoodie who enters by the exit and gets into a fight — the virus. Viruses invade. Blood cells are invaded.

What happens next is just one part of this very London“urban jungle” show. The other is how it got written, with Kene playing himself and in confessional mode about the particular challenges of being a playwright and black. Part gig, part play and a bunch of other things, too, the show feels like a one-man-show despite contributions from its musicians, Shiloh Coke on drums, Adrian McLeod on keyboard. They double as Kene’s opinionated black friends urging him not to write the kind of play about black suffering that white people expect.

If Kene takes a leaf out of American writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play An Octorooon, in which the author openly grapples with white expectations of what a black playwright should write, then at least he adapts that conversation into a black-on-black dialogue. And if, with its clever use of microphones and recorded sound, director Omar Elerian borrows and idea or two from Simon McBurney’s Complicité shows, no matter.

It’s all inventively deployed and constantly subverts the audience’s expectations. And just in case you thought you were a blood cell, if you are part of the middle-class gentrification that has invaded areas of working-class London, you’re a virus, too.

Sylvia

Old Vic

★★★✩✩

When a brilliant, unique thing turns out to be a game-changer, one of the downsides is that lots of people play the new game. What was once unique becomes common. Those who are in the large minority who have seen Hamilton, for instance, will get a slight sense of déjà vu if they see Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s musical Six, currently at London’s Arts Theatre. And that sense is more than slight with Sylvia, an ambitious musical version of the suffragette story. I say “saw” because its short run has ended, though it is destined to return.

What connects these shows is the idea of history being told through hip-hop. Not only hip-hop, mind. It’s a widely believed misconception that Hamilton is an exclusively a hip-hop show. It is not. And nor is Sylvia, for which the multi-talented Northwood-born, New York-based Josh Cohen and co-composer DJ Wilde have produced an excellent hip-hop, soul, funk, and reggae-embracing score.

Originally conceived as a dance piece by choreographer Kate Prince’s company Zoonation, it morphed during development into a full-blown musical. At the last minute, however, critics were asked to view it as a work-in-progress. This might be because at three hours it’s way too long. And, due to illness, Genesis Lynea in the title role has been replaced by understudy Maria Omakinwa.

The period is the early 1900s and the show’s heroines are the Pankhursts (led by Beverley Knight’s Emmeline), the family of female activists who tore down the pillar of patriarchy that ensured only men could vote.

More problematic than the show’s running time, however, is that the script written by Prince (who also directs) and Priya Parmar fails to make the case that Sylvia is the most compelling Pankhurst on which to base the show. The nearly-but-not-quite romance between Sylvia and Labour party founder Kier Hardie (John Dagleish) is interesting but is as underdeveloped on stage as it was apparently off. And, although the plot acknowledges the suffragette bomb placed outside the prime minister’s house, frustratingly we are told nothing about how these amazing women made and detonated it, and even less about the life and death of Emily Davison who was killed by the King’s horse while protesting at the races, a historic moment that arrives here like an afterthought.

Visually, the only nod to the period here is the wardrobe. Everything else, including the dialogue, is utterly now. Not just the music but the racially diverse cast. Black actors play white historical roles and any assumptions about how British history should be portrayed are thrillingly thrown out of the window. The sight of a black Winston Churchill (Delroy Atkinson), then Home Secretary, being told off by his domineering mom (Jade Hacket) in pumping, quasi-twerking ragga mode is priceless.

And it’s here the show transmits its powerful message, that Britain’s Suffragette campaign should be seen as the equivalent of America’s Civil Rights movement. As Emmeline Pankhurst might have said here, “true dat.”