For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy

Garrick Theatre | ★★★★★

Nothing in our theatre history has achieved what Ryan Calais Cameron’s remarkable and poetic play achieves. In two and a half funny, touching and poignant hours it reveals what it is to be young, black, British and male.

The return to the West End of Cameron’s simply staged but energetically performed production with a new cast of six superb actors is not only deserved. If this packed Monday evening performance is anything to go by it is the kind of theatre young audiences crave. The air was charged with the cathartic sense of stereotypes at last being dismantled and eloquently replaced by real people and experience.

Inspired by Ntozake Shange’s seminal 1974 poem, which reflects the lives of seven women from the black diaspora, Cameron focuses on the experience of British young black men as they attempt to free themselves from assumptions — sometimes white, but sometimes also black — about what it is to be a black man in this country.

The evening is largely constructed from a series of monologues. But what breathes life into them are the discussions they spark between the protagonists. They range from the broken-home street-raised hoody wearing Onyx (Tobi King Bakare) to middle-class university graduates Pitch (Shakeel Haakim) and Jet (Fela Lufadeju). Nothing on stage at the moment feels more essential.

An interesting footnote: though the Royal Court can claim bragging rights over the production, the play was commissioned by the New Diorama Theatre when it was run by David Byrne, now the incoming artistic director of the Court whose first season tackles Roald Dahl’s antisemitism with a new play by Mark Rosenblatt. A welcome wind of change is blowing through playhouses.