A few months before I saw Arinzé Kene’s Misty at London’s Bush theatre in 2018 I’d spent the summer in Edinburgh where I watched a lot of confessional, one-person shows. There is a huge amount of privilege in being able to stand up as a solo performer and say, I’m going to hold your attention for an hour and just tell you my story. These shows seemed to be the preserve of middle-class white people, with some fairly strict rules about what makes a good one.
Misty was not a confessional; it was a sort of interrogation of our society via the medium of a one-person show about a black man in London. It opens with this extraordinary soundscape and someone on stage performing a monologue about being on the night bus. You get into the swing of the piece and you understand that it’s going to be about gentrification and the experiences of this young black working-class man who gets into an altercation. And then the piece breaks.
Suddenly Arinzé was discussing whether this was the story we should be telling about black men in London. Two strands ran the whole way through. One of them was this accomplished, musically exciting, funny, sexy, violent and sad story of the kind we’ve seen before. Alongside it was a conversation about which stories black people are allowed to tell, what we expect from those narratives, and whether we need to tell more elevated stories about what blackness is and can be.
And there were all these voiceovers that sort of cut in. Conversations with producers, agents and friends. At a certain point, it became clear that the story he was telling was a real one that had happened to a friend of his. Then it went back into this incredibly cool piece of gig theatre.
Arinzé and I were professional acquaintances and he had called me up, probably in 2017, when he was workshopping Misty. He said: “Could you come in for a week and just mess around on the music?” At that point, I’d been a professional musician and was moving over into theatre. I’d acted in one or two things, but I was still trying to release music. So I went in and it became quite clear quite quickly that he had a clear sense of what the music was, and didn’t really need me there. But it was an extraordinary room to be in. I read an early draft of Misty and booked a ticket as soon as they came on sale.
A lot of theatre slightly talks down to its audience. Misty made the audience work and trusted that they would be able to keep up. Sometimes we think a show can either be educational and provocative or entertainment. I learned from Misty that you can be both. I also realised that I’d almost underestimated someone I knew and respected because I’d only seen him play roles that were traditionally written for black men. At that time I was going into auditions, trying to play what people wanted me to play. After Misty I understood that if I wanted to display the entirety of what I can bring as an artist, I was going to have to make the show myself.
• As told to Lindesay Irvine
• Anoushka Lucas stars in A Face in the Crowd at the Young Vic, London, until 9 November
