Lava, Bush Theatre review - poetic writing, mesmerically performed | reviews, news & interviews
Lava, Bush Theatre review - poetic writing, mesmerically performed
Lava, Bush Theatre review - poetic writing, mesmerically performed
Debut work from Benedict Lombe is a red-hot poem of protest
What’s in a name? In Benedict Lombe’s incendiary debut play at the Bush Theatre, the answer to this question encompasses a whole continent, an entire existential experience - the Black experience, to be exact - though not in the way that "roots" stories often proceed.
To unravel the tangled threads of her dual-nationality life, Her starts to explore among her "elsewheres". We learn she was born in the then-Belgian Congo, later renamed Zaire under President Mobuto. But he turned out to be a puppet, she says, and her family begins its flight to a "new world", via post-apartheid South Africa, a village in County Clare … and Wigan, an injection of bathos in a tale of great pathos.
The road ahead darkens. Everywhere Her is told she is "different’". Her family grows, she gains an adored little brother -- but then there was "another you", she tells him: Anthony (Walker, 18, murdered in Lancashire by a white man in 2005), smiling in his black blazer; then many more boy victims, a riot in Minneapolis, and the Black Lives Matter movement is born. Her is searching for the words but the Congolese-British Lombe has found them already. This is a full-bodied poem of red-hot protest, carefully modulated with humour to grip and persuade.
Adekoluejo, a mesmerising solo presence in a primrose yellow jumpsuit, burns up the stage. By way of introduction, she performs a riveting sequence of black dance moves and then reaches out to the audience almost like a standup. She goes on to populate Her’s story with all its main players: an exasperated but wise mother, sniffy Afrikaaner teacher, the white man she falls in love with in London. We see that under Her’s charm and buoyancy burn a pain and a rage that need to ‘"find the words" to spill out. The lava promised in the title starts gaining critical mass.
As this journey proceeds under Anthony Simpson-Pike's direction, Jasmine Swan's striking production design - a giant cardboard packing case surrounded by broken classical pillars, rust-red magma at their base - comes into its own. Her recognises it as a birth-land, a structure built on blood, rotting but still standing. Recorded voices of white people interject: "Just for argument’s sake", "Why does it always have to be about race?" One journalist accuses black drama of being "more lecture than theatre".
But where else but a theatre should Black writers "find the words", Her/Lombe asks? Adekoluejo doesn’t come out for a conventional curtain call; this is theatre of a different order.
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