Bus journeys have long held freighted racial histories, from Rosa Parks’ stand in Alabama to the Bristol bus boycott and, most bleakly, Stephen Lawrence’s murder at a bus stop on 22 April 1993.
This last event is the underlying tragedy to which this production is pinned, although it journeys through time and inflects our present with several pasts and parallel universes. Conceived by Mojisola Adebayo, Roy Williams and Matthew Xia, and directed by Xia, it is a surreal, captivating and ultimately life-affirming ride, constructed as a bus journey from Deptford to Woolwich. We are ushered on to the double-decker by a warmly bossy conductor (Llewella Gideon, irresistibly likable) from a bygone age.
A co-production by the Actors Touring Company and Greenwich + Docklands international festival, it is written by Bola Agbaje, Dexter Flanders and Vanessa Macaulay alongside Williams and Adebayo, and the script undulates from meditative moments of lyricism to funny, quickfire dialogue and spoken word, interspersed with songs and music composed by Xana. We are positioned as eavesdroppers, listening in on the lives of fellow passengers.
A pregnant woman (Doreene Blackstock) speaks of her hopes for the baby boy she is carrying. A few stops later, time jumps forward and he boards the bus as a man. Two teenagers jump on (Omar Austin and Dalumuzi Moyo, both excellent), one of whom is a sixth-former planning on becoming an architect. They banter, tease and talk about the party they will go to and the girls they might meet, as well as the everyday racism they face. The relationship between Black mothers and their sons is a running theme, with the former worrying over the navigation of Black masculinity in a world so hostile to it.
There is lightness, too: a young British Caribbean couple (Danielle Kassaraté and Daniel Ward), dressed from the 1970s, chat, flirt and burst into song. They look like characters from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe TV series, and those strains become more apparent when the conductor starts singing Silly Games and we join in. It is reminiscent of the Small Axe instalment Lovers Rock, and filled with the same euphoria. There are other such uplifting moments embodying Black joy.
In between there is quietness, which creates space for us to think and feel. We look out of the window and see both our world and intimations of Lawrence’s. We pass runners (Lawrence ran with the local Cambridge Harriers athletic club), glimpse his memorial, and a billboard marking the 30th anniversary of his death.
The most moving moment, for me, comes as the aspiring architect stares into space, lost in daydreams. In the powerful silence, we are taken back to Lawrence’s unspent hopes and dreams.
A smart middle-aged man (Karl Collins) – the production’s titular architect – boards the bus and looks like the man Lawrence might have become. He makes a speech, off the bus, which distils his vision for a better society. But it is different in tone to the emotional drama, spoken and unspoken, that has come before in a truly transporting ride.
