Lyrical and loosely structured, Sam Selvon’s 1956 British Caribbean novel does not readily lend itself to the stage. It is also a tricky proposition to bring his “big city” tale to life in a space as snug as this subterranean venue.
So the power of this production, adapted by Roy Williams and directed by Ebenezer Bamgboye, is all the more startling. Selvon’s sprawling story about Windrush-era arrivals in London is given a small-scale expressionist treatment with a cast of seven sitting across the stage, postcodes flashing up in a glare of lights. The stripping down is counterintuitive but inspired.
We follow a posse of outsider immigrants, who come to the “mother country” to realise they are not welcome. There is the unemployed, despairing Lewis (Tobi Bakare), newcomer Galahad (Romario Simpson), the desperate Big City (Gilbert Kyem Jr) and the sad, central voice of Moses (Gamba Cole). Their camaraderie and loneliness are piercingly evoked.
There is also the fantastically haughty Tanty (Carol Moses), Lewis’s wife Agnes (Shannon Hayes) and Christina (Aimee Powell), a haunting from Moses’s past. The female characters are vivid but peripheral because this is really a study of Black masculinity, including its toxic effects on the women in the men’s lives, and it seems like a miniature companion piece to Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy.
Williams gives Selvon’s rambling structure a tighter shape and characters speak in monologues, sometimes facing up to hostile invisible forces. It is not always clear to whom characters are speaking if you have not read the book, but it does not matter because their words carry immense drama.
Sometimes there is sultry song (by Powell, who has a rich, honeyed voice), and characters speak against the strum of a guitar, skitter of drums or more jagged sounds, thrillingly designed by Tony Gayle. The theatricality is slightly overplayed in the movement (from slo-mo to dance) but where this might have become too stiffly stylised, it adds to the sense of emotional storytelling. Lights and music are used to intensify the story’s psychological undercurrents.
There is little of the comedy we see in the Windrush-era musical The Big Life, currently revived at Theatre Royal Stratford East, but the same sense of radical joy in the characters’ lives, from Agnes and Tanty’s dancing to the banter and horseplay between the men.
The cast are tremendous, capturing the hope, innocence and betrayals of immigrant life. Each actor makes their character real and likable, but with no hint of sentimentality. There are many searing moments, from the painful way in which Agnes and Lewis’s relationship turns abusive to Galahad, beaten and bloodied, seeing himself as Black as if for the first time.
Every element of the show hypnotises, capturing the pained romance of the city, and these lonely Londoners in it.
At Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 6 April
