Bob the musical, with just a whiff of spliff

KWAMe Kwei-Armah was very clear about how he wanted to depict Bob Marley (pictured) in a musical about the Jamaican reggae legend.

He did not want to project Marley, who died in 1981, through a lens of ‘sex and loose morality’ — the way he feels many black icons are treated.

And he did not want the narrative of his show, One Love: The Bob Marley Musical, dominated by talk of ‘weed, dreadlocks, and his many children’.

Rather, Kwei-Armah, who staged an earlier iteration in Baltimore last year, sees Marley more as a hero.

‘We start looking at Bob as a young man, trying to hustle and get his way into the music industry; and as he becomes successful, so grows his social responsibility,’ said KweiArmah, who has written the book and will direct One Love at Birmingham Repertory Theatre from March 10.

The production, sanctioned by Marley’s family, will focus on the singersongwriter’s attempts at peacemak- ing. Marley tried to bring harmony to his homeland when rival political factions and gangs were tearing it apart. ‘He sang to the disenchanted and the disaffected,’ he said.

The show switches between Kingston, Jamaica and punk-era London, where Marley fled in 1977 after an assassination attempt. He wrote some of his best pieces in the uK — exodus and Kaya among them.

Kwei-Armah said One Love does not sanitise Marley’s life. ‘I don’t ignore relationships he had with other women,’ he said. ‘I don’t ignore that weed was an essential part of the way that he operated. For the rasta, weed was part of their service to God.’

But he added that didn’t mean the show would be ‘Bob rolling an ever larger spliff and going Jah, mon.’

‘Look, the idea is to make it rock in Birmingham,’ he said. ‘People are coming to hear Bob’s music, and there will be plenty of it — 25 songs — but it’s not a jukebox musical.’