How diverse is theatre? Are there more roles for BAME actors on stage? What about colour-blind casting? These are questions the entertainment industry has been asking itself in recent times and has answered in often positive ways.
But lived experience suggests otherwise for Simone (Olivia Onyehara), who is a mixed-race singer, and Cassi (Tanisha Spring), a black actor. Both are made to feel lucky to be riding the cresting wave of this diversity, though in practice they contend with dire levels of racial typecasting in the audition rooms.
This play is about race and representation which, as one of the two characters quips, might as well be called “Dear White Producers” – a variation on the Netflix series, Dear White People. It is in many ways a direct address to industry gatekeepers through the barbed, intelligent humour of Cassiopeia Berkeley-Agyepong and Simone Ibbett-Brown’s script: a diverse version of Hamlet the Musical that is “keen to cast actors from a BAME background” and boasts a “gospel slash soul soundtrack” with a street-dance battle between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
The playfulness grows teeth in the strongest moments and tips into savage, incendiary satire. Nothing is off limits, from the “woke” generation to questions about the worth of making art over taking direct action.
Scenes take us from laughter to appalled silence, as in a skit performed in song at a bar, in which the women are crudely exoticised by a white man whose leering becomes a crescendo of racist abuse. In another moment, Simone auditions for a part in Porgy and Bess, but ends up singing about cotton fields, complete with white gloves and jazz hands. This minstrel act is a repeated refrain, the point being that women like Simone and Cassi are cornered into performing the role of the happy slave again and again.
The play is being developed in a meta-fictive style on stage as it is performed, and rather than bearing a linear plot-line, it is made up of disparate scenarios, from song and dance routines to auditions, text messages spoken as dialogue and a quiz show that awards points for accepting everyday racist micro-aggressions from friends and strangers.
“If we just string together a load of conversations that we have, it [the play] will just feel structureless,” said Simone as they argue about how to make their production work. She is right and it is structureless, but charmingly so. The bigger flaw is the relationship between Simone and Cassi, which does not quite elicit the rocky intensity and emotional drama that it requires. But there is much else in this fierce, fearless and cerebral production to fill the gaps.
At Soho theatre, London, until 26 October.
This article was updated on 7 October. The original version gave the wrong star rating due to a production error.
