black culture
aleks.sierz
I live in Brixton, south London. To get to the tube, I have to cross Windrush Square. Since 2021, I go past the Cherry Groce memorial, which honours the woman who was wrongfully shot by the Met in 1985, an event which sparked the riots I remember so well from 40 years ago. Amazingly enough, I have now seen her sister, Sutara Gayle AKA Lorna Gee, performing a gig theatre piece on the main stage at the Royal Court.The Legends of Them is an autobiographical memory play during the course of which young Lorna grows into Sutara Gayle, told in fragmentary flashbacks which are vivid enough to be Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Cryptocurrency is like the myth of El Dorado – a promised land made of fool’s gold. Despite its liberatory potential, it frequently attracts sharks or, as the title of Beru Tessema’s new play indicates, hungry wolves that gobble up defenceless sheep.After the success here of his 2022 play, House of Ife, the playwright returns to the Bush Theatre with a subject which is original and a cast which includes a cameo by Jamael Westman, star veteran of the original West End production of Hamilton. This time, however, some slack plotting and predictable consequences undermine the drama of a slightly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mati Diop’s “speculative documentary” reverses the transatlantic journey of her feature debut Atlantics’ ghost Senegalese migrants, as plundered Beninese artefacts are returned from France. Dahomey is about African displacement and despoilment, and Diop chooses to give these ancient, ritually charged statues of men and beasts the sonorous voice of some alien god found floating in an sf space-capsule, an Afrofuturist deity speaking across centuries.The Kingdom of Dahomey’s fierce war against French colonisation was lost in 1892, when thousands of treasures were looted and shipped back to Paris Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“The street I grew up in had no name and is in a country that no longer exists,” director Milisuthando Bongela begins her meditation about growing up in Transkei, a semi-fictional black nation which helped facilitate apartheid yet felt like a utopia.Bongela splices forgotten archives of polished propaganda, raw videotaped reality and painful conversation to understand her own racial reality, and how colonial scars can be complimentary yet invisible for black and white South Africans today. White hands are shown etching borders and conjuring flags, stamps and anthems as Bantustan “homelands” Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is not only the first play by a black woman to premiere on Broadway, back in 1959, but it’s also a cultural goldmine. So powerful is its depiction of the postwar African-American experience that it has inspired at least two other recent dramatic responses: Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (2010) and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Beneatha’s Place (2013).Watching A Raisin in the Sun’s current staging, directed by Tinuke Craig for Headlong and visiting the Lyric Hammersmith as part of a national tour, it also resonates with other recent 1950s revivals: A Taste of Honey Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album only has one serious flaw: LL COOL J didn’t open it with “OK you can call it a comeback”. Sorry, cheap joke (if you didn’t know, his classic hit “Mama Said Knock You Out” starts with the lyric “Don’t call it a comeback!” and this, his 14th album, is his first in 11 years).But honestly no, there really isn’t a lot wrong with this record: LL is in fine voice and furious flow, and the beats – entirely produced by Q Tip from A Tribe Called Quest – are a reminder that old-school, sample-based hip hop can be as heavyweight, as compelling, as mind-bending as anything post-trap youngsters Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Pete Waterman, responsible (some might prefer the word guilty) for more than 100 Top 40 hits, said that a pop song is the hardest thing to write. Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back – all wrapped up in three minutes. Benedict Lombe’s Shifters takes longer – 33 Kylies longer – but it pulls off the same devilishly difficult trick and, as with the best earworms of the 1980s, it’s likely to stay in your head for years. Dre(am) is at his Nana’s wake when, late and unannounced, Des(tiny) is suddenly in the room, the impact of her arrival akin to his being hit in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s an exuberant comedy from the start in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, which comes to London after an initial Covid-truncated Off Broadway run which brought her a Pulitzer prize in 2021. Roy Alexander Weise’s production puts in all the energy it can find and then more, doing its best to balance that comedy with the more serious themes, such as family responsibility, and a man’s role in the world, with which it is interspersed.It’s a balance that the production does not finally quite achieve, however, with an extended first half dominated by the kitchen banter of four Memphis friends, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Following the huge success of Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, which transfers soon to the West End, the Bush Theatre is riding high. Now this venue’s latest exploration of the Black-British experience tells a really lively and emotionally deep story about Nigerians in London.Faith Omole, whose first and as yet unperformed play, Kaleidoscope, won the prestigious Alfred Fagon Award last year, arrives with bang with My Father’s Fable. Since Omole is also an actor, and has appeared in the Channel 4 comedy, We Are Lady Parts, it’s no surprise that her debut is both a comedy and an acute look at the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Book of Clarence comes lumbered with the charge of being the new Life of Brian, an irreverent spoof of the life of Christ destined to ruffle good Christians’ feathers. It turns out not to be the “new” anything, though: it’s refreshingly sui generis, as the Romans might have said.It opens with a dramatic orchestral chord, precisely timed to arrive at the exact same moment as the opening tableau of a mass Crucifixion, hanging in the midst of which is a grimacing Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield). We then flashback to an “early Sunday morning 33AD, Lower Jerusalem”, where Clarence and his Read more ...
Heather Neill
The reviews of Tyrell Williams' debut play on its first and second outings at the Bush Theatre were universally enthusiastic, even ecstatic. Multiple awards followed, including a clean sweep of those for first-time or promising writers. So how does it look in the newest venue in the West End, in the round – or rather square?The first impression is of relaxed confidence: these young men – both characters and actors (Kedar Williams-Stirling as Bilal pictured below left, Emeka Sesay as Joey and Francis Lovehall as Omz) – own this space. We the audience are welcome to Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
When For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy first moved to the West End in 2023, it felt like a risky venture. It had started in the tiny New Diorama, and later packed out the Royal Royal Court, but was a transfer to Shaftesbury Avenue a crazy step too far?Not a bit of it. The run was a triumph, and now it confidently returns to yet a fourth theatre, with a new cast and all the trappings of a starry first night. It takes its place in a West End that is hosting a particularly adventurous season this spring and is trying to reach out to new audiences. Yes, I Read more ...