Honest triptych of audio monologues on Black British identity and the pandemic
During lockdown, Pitlochry Festival Theatre collaborated with the Edinburgh Lyceum to produce Sound Stage, a series of plays written by leading writers, among them Mark Ravenhill, Roy Williams and Timberlake Wertenbaker. The Perthshire theatre has continued to produce audio work – albeit of a slightly lower profile – under the same aegis post-pandemic. First, there was A Journey with Nan Shepherd, a kaleidoscopic, three-part survey of the life of the Scottish writer. Now, there is this triptych of mini-monologues created in collaboration with Stockroom theatre company.
The three short, one-person plays take Black people’s complex relationship with the Covid-19 vaccine as a starting point to explore wider questions of the Black British experience during the pandemic. Inspired by interviews conducted by the writing team with Black people living across south London, what they lack in formal and tonal variety they make up for in honesty and acuity. Issues of trust, community and identity swirl in quick, questioning doses of drama.
The first piece, Isaac Tomiczek’s Future Brixton Royalty, is the most compelling, neatly eliding a young, mixed-race man’s uncertainty over his own identity with his uneasiness over the changing face of his native Brixton. Performer Kiren Kebaili-Dwyer meditates animatedly on Harry and Meghan’s 2018 visit to south London, on the feeling of belonging he feels in the barbershop, and on his friend’s vaccine scepticism. Throughout, he constantly questions his own Blackness, his own Britishness and his own Brixton-ness. It emerges as an honest and entertaining identity crisis.
The second, Maheni Arthur’s The Process, takes the listener into the frantic mind of a self-isolating, doom-scrolling young woman, dreaming of a family holiday to Barbados but anxious about taking the vaccine that will allow her to travel there. The third, Trigger Warning by Zimbabwean-born writer Tonderai Munyevu, is the most direct, essentially a personal essay on how the Black community’s vaccine-scepticism was represented in the media, and how that made Munyevu feel.
Performed by Michelle Tiwo and Stefan Adegbola respectively, neither is exactly captivating theatrically, but both delve deep into a significant subject: how the vaccine roll-out and the government’s wider response to the Covid-19 pandemic twisted and tested Black British people’s sense of self, drawing new lines within society while ignoring existing divisions.
Could there be more narrative drama injected into each play? Yes. Is it a bit odd that a Perthshire theatre is making work about Londoners? Also, yes. Yet these are slickly produced pieces – kudos to directors Munyevu and Debbie Hannan, sound designer Louis Blatherwick and composer Rina Mushonga – and they tackle important issues. Getting a quick jab of their insights is recommended.