JOHN NATHAN

Trafalgar Studios

ARE YOU a blood cell or a virus? According to Arinzé Kene’s mercurial firecracker of a show, you are one or the other. You are either the passengers on a night bus — blood cells — or that hunched figure, trousers slung low, head shrouded in hoodie who enters by the exit and gets into a fight — the virus. Viruses invade. Blood cells are invaded.

What happens next is just one part of this very London“urban jungle” show. The other is how it got written, with Kene playing himself and in confessional mode about the particular challenges of being a playwright and black. Part gig, part play and a bunch of other things, too, the show feels like a one-man-show despite contributions from its musicians, Shiloh Coke on drums, Adrian McLeod on keyboard. They double as Kene’s opinionated black friends urging him not to write the kind of play about black suffering that white people expect.

If Kene takes a leaf out of American writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play An Octorooon, in which the author openly grapples with white expectations of what a black playwright should write, then at least he adapts that conversation into a black-onblack dialogue. And if, with its clever use of microphones and recorded sound, director Omar Elerian borrows and idea or two from Simon McBurney’s Complicité shows, no matter.

It’s all inventively deployed and constantly subverts the audience’s expectations. And just in case you thought you were a blood cell, if you are part of the middle-class gentrification that

HEN A brilliant, unique thing turns out to be a gamechanger, one of the downsides is that lots of people play the new game. What was once