In Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up to discover he’s been turned into a giant beetle. In Sam Steiner’s Kanye the First, a young, stressed white woman called Annie – who feels as if she has failed in life – wakes up to find she has been transformed into the superstar Kanye West, who has recently died.
Inside, she’s still Annie but she now looks and speaks just like Kanye. Not surprisingly, her terminally ill mum and high-achieving sister are shocked, but dealing with them is nothing compared with negotiating Kanye’s second coming – not to mention life with Kim and the kids, and meeting the expectations of fans.
In 2014, Steiner’s ingenious debut play Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, about a world where everyone is given only 140 words a day to express everything they want and need to say, announced him as an eye-catching talent at the Edinburgh fringe. His own second coming is part of the HighTide festival’s pop-up season in Walthamstow, London: two weeks of comedy and performance in a temporary tented venue called the Mix.
The beauty of Lemons was its simple audacity. Here, the weight of complexities that arise from the initial conceit constantly threaten to capsize Steiner’s play as he attempts to cover everything from cultural appropriation to the role of fandom in contemporary culture.
Imogen Doel gives a terrific performance as Annie and the play is often interesting in a this-could-go-anywhere way, but Steiner sometimes forgets to entertain us while he’s busy cramming in all the issues. Not for nothing is Annie’s more successful sister Eve (Keziah Joseph) planning to write a thesis on “the inherent violence of narrative form”.
The casting and doubling of characters cleverly undercuts our expectations and toys with ideas of shifting identity and how we construct and present ourselves to the world. The play also often hits the comic sweet spot. But it never makes us empathise either with Annie or Kanye, who are both in their own ways facing enormous pressures to be the people who others demand. It also seems a bit of a cop-out when it becomes increasingly apparent that the whole thing might merely be an anxiety dream. Of course, after such a distinctive debut, Steiner – like both Annie and West – is subject to our expectations. If Kanye the First is not an outright winner, it gives notice of the scale of Steiner’s ambition.
The HighTide lineup includes another chance to see David Aula and Simon Evans’ sneakily confounding magic show The Vanishing Man, Paper Birds’ Mobile and Theresa Ikoko’s Girls, hatched at HighTide’s Aldeburgh festival last year. There’s also a new piece by Nessah Muthy, Heroine, about mixed-race soldier Grace (a very good Asmara Gabrielle) who is given a medical discharge after her tour in Afghanistan. Grace gets involved with an apparently benign group of women in a Croydon community centre and gradually their real motivations become apparent.
The flat naturalism of Muthy’s drama seems more TV friendly than theatrically vibrant. It comes from a long tradition of plays about women finding community and strength through protest typified by Nell Dunn’s 1981 play Steaming, but gives the subject a twist as it turns out that Wendy (Lucy Thackeray), who is leading the group to save the community centre from being sold, is a former English Defence League member, and that Grace has her own ideas about what constitutes patriotism.
It terrific to see working-class women portrayed on stage, and plays such as this and Andrea Dunbar’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too, currently touring, remind us how rare that is. But the relationship between Wendy, bereaved mother Cheryl (Wendy Morgan) and the food bank-dependant Bev (Maggie McCarthy) lacks grounding detail and comes perilously close to sentimentality.
Neither Heroine nor Kanye the First sits particularly well in the Mix, a venue that when used end-on, as it is here, has a wide exposing stage and none of the tight intimacy of a pop-up space such as Paines Plough’s Roundabout (which has been such a shot in the arm for new writing). As the National Theatre’s Shed proved, and the Edinburgh fringe demonstrates every year, temporary spaces can be nifty platforms for work that may sit uncomfortably in more traditional plush-seated venues that come with a range of expectations about what theatre is and how it should look and sound. Both plays here not only compete with the noise of passing busses, but are also hampered by perfunctory designs – and in the case of Heroine by lacklustre direction – that is in danger of making them look cut-price rather than enticingly rough and ready.
• HighTide is at various venues in Walthamstow, London, until 8 October. Box office: 01728 573 101.
