This charismatic but chaotic play unearths a fabulous, forgotten figure from 19th century letters and race history: August Boyle Chamberlayne Merriman-Labor, a Sierra Leonean barrister, businessman and travelling lecturer who came to Edwardian London and wrote a satirical ethnography cum travelogue entitled Briton Through Negro Spectacles.
It was a delicious spoof of studies of Africa by so-called western experts. This picaresque play combines Merriman-Labor’s life and journey into the “heart of whiteness” with that of a modern-day narrator grieving his dead boyfriend, Alfred, and putting on this play to honour him.
Joseph Akubeze gives a charming performance as he shuttles between the stories, which both feature queer Black identity and illicit or taboo sexual desire but the switches from one to the other feel frustratingly haphazard.
Written by Eloka Obi and Saul Boyer and directed by Sam Rayner, this 60-minute play is underpinned by rigorous and admirable research but Merriman-Labor’s story feels both too brief and hemmed in by the complicated modern-day framing.
There are meta-theatrical stops and starts as the narrator tells us he is not an actor, that his late boyfriend Alfred studied at Cambridge University and wrote this play about Merriman-Labor, that he has forgotten his lines, and on and on.
Akubeze is a good physical actor who plays multiple characters with aplomb and uses object puppetry as well as foley sounds, running to a microphone for the sound effects and back to a table lamp which stands in, rather bizarrely, for Merriman-Labor’s lover, John Roberts.
The effect is scrappy and underwhelming with the modern-day storyline ultimately becoming a distraction from the trailblazing forgotten figure at the heart of this drama.
At the Vaults, London, until 5 March. Vault festival runs until 19 March.
