Inspiring and absorbing, this look at city life is full of surprises
Misty Trafalgar Studios, SW1 ★★★★★
It was recently announced that Madani Younis will step down as artistic director of the Bush in west London to take up the high-status role of “creative director” of the Southbank Centre – a remarkable progression for a theatre-maker barely known at the start of the decade. He has come far
– as has the Bush.
The focus of his increasingly sure-footed regime has been on diversity, with an accent on dissonance and dissent. And no work to emerge during his tenure more encapsulates that spirit than Arinzé Kene’s Misty, which has transferred to become the second play by a black British playwright in the West End. The first was Kwame Kwei-armah’s
Elmina’s Kitchen – in 2005. And to some extent Misty feels like a quirky, maverick, avant-garde response to Kwei-armah’s conventional, West Indian restaurant-set drama about life (and death) – or at least the kind of newsworthy dispatch from the grim urban front line that it represented.
Kene (who coincidentally was an achingly soulful Sam Cooke in Kwei-armah’s 2016 Donmar production of One Night in Miami) also stars and begins by treating us to a fiery monologue. The youthful, bearded, Nigerian-born actor, pensive beneath his woolly beanie, raprhapsodises about the city, its bodily aspect, and about an ugly set-to with a drunk on a night-bus: “I get to happy slapping him, blood cell splattering, batter him, nothing else mattering,” he intones into the mic, the threatening mood stoked by pounding percussion and ominous synths (Shiloh Coke and Adrian Mcleod, seated on either side).
This pumped-up “persona” likens himself to a virus, implicitly combative, even malevolent. But hang on – the scene then shifts to a droll, disapproving response to all of this, delivered via answerphone message, from two of Kene’s friends (a babysaddled couple; Coke and Mcleod again). “You wrote a n---- play so your work would get on. Ain’t nothing but a modern minstrel show,” charges the woman, Donna. “You don’t want none of this,” chips in the man, Raymond, meaning the trials of parenthood, as the baby starts wailing; “This will turn you into an angry young black man for real.” The point is swiftly made – through this, the first of many strokes of disconcerting humour – that perhaps a black audience craves something far less “dramatic” and stereotypically bound up with the mean streets of the urban jungle.
From hereon in, Kene is in a debate with himself about what he should be making – everything is turned inside out so that the process itself is the “play”. Does that sound like a nightmare of thespian navel-gazing? Well, be warned, Misty is inescapably self-involved. But it is knowingly, defiantly so – arguing, by roundabout means, that this “art about art” communicates something resonant and relevant about life today.
As much bumbling clown as muscular force to be reckoned with, by turns endearing and commanding, Kene keeps you guessing where he’s going next, daring to let things trail off, shifting tempo. Amid a deceptively unadorned production – directed by Omar Elerian – that keeps springing visual surprises, a motif emerges of an orange balloon. They come in different sizes, different quantities, with Kene’s head emerging from inside one.
Yet there’s a sting in the tale. Those balloons represent something nagging in his subconscious and it’s a tribute to this absorbing (if perhaps tooprotracted) evening that by the end of it, you feel you’ve been drawn into his mind itself – it’s wondrously phantasmagorical and inspiringly individualistic.