“Unbridled and Exuberant”

Editorial Rating: 4 Stars: Outstanding

When you enter into the Lyceum, white is the colour that pops into your head. Not a black veil in front of the eyes; not velvet, countless red. 

No. White.

When you grab a sit on the bottom row and see a rather elegant field of white hair, white skin, middle class spectators facing a stage where a bunch of black actors are dancing unbridled and exuberant, owning the whole place at the sound of Afro B… it’s just priceless. For once, you don’t feel in a museum but within a game of contrasts that actually mingle.Visual art at its best. 

This storytelling masterpiece is a living example of how an actor actually enjoying the momentum can warm up the audience, let it breath and even feel grateful.

Inua Ellams’ play talks about the affairs of working-class (surprise!) black men through an intimate, tender study of masculinity’s emotional and political anatomy. Stories set in barber shops across Africa, interlinked as threads (wires in the scenography help to create this imagery) pass through the eye of a needle that spins like a hanging globe  – London.

Industrial set design, expressionist lightning and alienating effects remind us of a Brechtian play. Sheibani’s canny direction is not far from that. Articulate expressiveness highlights what Odin Teatret would call the presence of the actor and lives in different kinds of anthropological scenic art – eyes, mouth, hands and feet proficiency-. The homogeneous and impressive cast work is shaped by Aline David (the female presence in the script came to light at the after-show talk, but what about the production?). 

Along with the movement, the glowing pulse of the vocal work- phatic expressions, highly marked cadences as if the sentences were sung, voice projection- makes this a great example of what storytelling is. Needless to say, the art of storytelling is to keep the audience interested, and this production managed to keep the energy well-balanced from beginning to end – though sometimes it flirts with devolving into a stream of political or cultural references. Still, that’s what we ultimately want as an audience, to make the brain dance with the play since we cannot -unfortunately- dance on the seats.  Because If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution

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Reviewer: Helena Salguiero (Seen 8 November)