Raw and emotional, but enough of the scolding!
Pass Over (Kiln Theatre, London ) Verdict: A cul-de-sac of rage ★★★✩✩
WRITER Antoinette nwandu commends what she calls the ‘ rich experience’ of her play Pass over to ‘black and brown communities in London’. By her admiring account, it’s suitable for my wife and possibly my children, but not, it seems, for me.
nonetheless, I quite liked the sound of it and took along my mate Phil (yes, also white and middle-aged). He loved it; me, not so much.
It’s about two black men living on the street of an American city and it specialises in monotonously laboured symbolism.
The dominant man is called moses. Like his namesake in the Bible, he hopes to escape the legacy of slavery and, with his friend Kitch, ‘pass over’ a nearby river to find freedom on the other side.
There’s also a theme of the two men being ‘passed over’ by white authorities. one aspect of this white authority is represented by a privileged young man who offers to share a picnic basket he’s taking to his mother.
The other kind is represented by a snarling cop embodying the violent side of white domination, who steals their apple pie.
my mate Phil enjoyed the pulsing dialogue that mostly revolves around rhythmic use of the n-word.
The two men use this word with each other as a term of affection and solidarity. But it remains highly taboo for the white character, who never says it but is accused of thinking it.
For me, this is way too sectarian, and I soon tired of being scolded for attitudes I already deplore.
Having said that, Indhu Rubasingham’s production is blessed with two astonishingly intense performances from rising stars Paapa essiedu and Gershwyn eustache Jr.
Between them they dig a huge emotional range from nwandu’s incantatory writing — desperate, anxious, joyful, fearful, defeated, angry and sad. But on Robert Jones’s kerbside set of a oneway street, the play never feels like it’s going anywhere.
That, I suppose, is nwandu’s point, and there is more than a touch of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot here — the play in which nothing happens twice.
even so, to me it just feels stuck in a cul- de- sac of anger and recrimination.