news | Tom Bolton

Sutara Gayle. Photo by Harry Elletson

The Legends of Them by Sutara Gayle AKA Lorna Gee – Royal Court Theatre, London

Sutara Gayle has had quite the life. Her one woman show expresses remarkable experiences through powerful, focused theatre. Gayle, born in Brixton, is a musician, singer, DJ and British reggae pioneer. She has lived in New York, opened for Shabba Ranks, spent time in Holloway Prison, and changed her name during a spiritual retreat in India. Her brother Mooji is a Hindu guru. Her sister Cherry’s shooting by police triggered the 1985 Brixton Riots. The Legends of Them combines music, film (projections by Tyler Forward and Daniel Batters) and a swirling array of characters, all played by Gayle, into a journey of awakening and discovery.

Gayle is also an actor, with a long career on stage and in film and television. This is the one aspect of her life she does not mention, and there is no need because it is obvious. Legends of Them is a performance tour de force. Gayle plays a long list of people she meets across eras and places – from Linton Kwesi Johnson to school friends, taxi drivers, dominoes players and policemen – who pass across the stage and through her life in sometimes dream-like fragments. She conveys each scene with minimum fuss and the maximum skill, using a vocal intonation, a tilt of the head, or a flick of the wrist. Gayle makes it look easy, but her performance is a masterclass in storytelling, from which other, far less subtle one-person shows could learn at lot.

The Legends of Them conjures up lost eras and events, knotting them loosely together as the bigger picture emerges, piece by piece. Although Gayle is the connecting presence, the show is explicitly about four legends in her life: her mother Euphemia, sister Cherry, brother Mooji, and the 17th century Jamaican freedom fighter, Nanny of the Maroons. Euphemia, who came to Brixton from Jamaica, brought up eight children, and pounded out living from her sewing machine. Cherry, who died in 2011, found herself thrust into the national news in disastrous circumstances, which she handled with great dignity. Her older brother Mooji is her guiding light, imparting Buddhist wisdom that helps Gayle see beyond tragedy and turmoil in her life. And Nanny is part of a suppressed history of resistance to empire, fighting the 17th century British occupation of Jamaica, and giving identity to those fighting the same battles today.

She threads together their stories expertly, never over-explaining but giving the audience enough to understand what is happening and why it matters. It is a high-wire act completed with supreme confidence, co-created with director Jo McInnes and dramaturg Nina Lyndon. Then there is the music. Gayle is a highly versatile writer and singer, and she sings at key moments. The set is dominated by a vast speaker stack covered in disco lights, which flash a backdrop to the action. Gayle strides on stage and immediately shows us what she’s capable of with her trademark reggae MC delivery, immediately raising excitement levels to eleven. Having established her formidable skills, she uses her full range, singing charming numbers influenced by pop and gospel, written with composer and musical director Christella Litras. She expresses herself directly and truthfully through music, which is clearly an essential part of her existence, and drives the show.

Gayle, with her collaborators, conjures an evening which is subtle, carefully woven, and at times exhilarating theatre, but it is more than that. The Legends of Them is a big success for the still-relatively-new Brixton House theatre, where it was first performed before moving the Royal Court – taking a show which is Brixton through and through into Belgravia. But it is more than a theatre production. Sutara Gayle’s life tracks the Black experience in Britain, through the terrible personal impact of racism and sexism, to personal fulfilment and self-knowledge. She is a local heroine, but her voice reaches far beyond SW9. She speaks from long, tough experience, and The Legends of Them sends a message which is proud, loud and clear.

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen – Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London

Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production of Ghosts is the first Ibsen to be staged in the candelit glow of the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, and it looks remarkable. Set and costumes, designed by Rosanna Vise, are from a decadent mid-20th century society. The back wall consists of mirrors and the floor a cocoon of blood red, deep pile carpet. It is alluring and disturbing like the costumes – the upper class characters in velvet dresses and satin waistcoats, enfolding iron gloves. From the upper levels, the production takes place beneath a bank of six chandeliers which, while offering more of a glimpsed view than a theatre audience would expect, show the action in soft focus. The whole production looks like Visconti’s 1963 film, ‘The Leopard’, in its low light designed to reveal only costly surfaces. Osvald, infected with syphilis, compares his softening brain to “cherry-coloured velvet”, and the setting depicts suffocating interiors from which there is no escape.

It remains hard to imagine how Ibsen’s play, still direct and shocking, would have seemed to its original audience. Hill-Gibbins deploys the high end cast at his disposal with relish, and they make the most of Ibsen’s brutal exposé of hypocrisy. Paul Hilton’s Parson Manders is a canting fool, a man whose only show of strength lies in his moral convictions, which are thoroughly mistaken. It is hard to imagine why Hattie Morahan’s Helene Alving loved him, but the fact she did makes the poverty of her existence plain. She gives a riveting performance, quivering with a lifetime’s suppressed rage, then collapsing with absolute despair. Stuart Thompson as her son, Osvald, conveys the character’s conflicting emotions and failure to escape his social constraints very well indeed. Sarah Slimani’s Regene is blunt and unsentimental, the only character with any hope of achieving any freedom. And Greg Hicks is brilliant as the wheedling, deceitful Engstram, who has Manders in the palm of his hand. He creeps around the stage with his bad leg, like Richard III without the social position. Yet we feel a residual sympathy for a man whose class has limited his opportunities to opening a brothel and getting others to fund his drinking.

Hill-Gibbins, consistently one of the most interesting British directors of the classics, pulls off a sophisticated, layered account. He has also adapted the play, and the version is crisp and startling. This production shows the quality of productions that the Globe Theatre, frustratingly inconsistent in the past, can and should be staging. It also reconfirms the reputation of Ghosts as one of the touchstone plays that made modern theatre.

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