Theatre: Tree
Young Vic, London SE1 (020-7922 2922). From 29 July to 24 August Running time: 1hr 30mins (no interval)
The biennial Manchester International Festival got underway last week with an unfortunate public row hanging over its theatrical curtain-raiser – a lively promenade show, with music and dancing, about a young mixed-race Englishman uncovering his ancestral roots in South Africa, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Tree, which finishes in Manchester today, is billed as being “co-created” by the actor Idris Elba, who based the idea on his 2014 album mi Mandela, and the Young Vic’s artistic director, Kwame Kwei-Armah. But two writers, Sarah Henley and Tori Allen-Martin, have gone public with the charge that after much work developing and writing Tree, they were cut out of the project “with little respect for due process, courtesy or appropriate crediting”. What exactly happened is likely to remain a mystery. And that’s probably quite apposite: the show itself is something of a “puzzle”.
Tree is certainly staged with great energy and ebullience, said Will Gompertz on BBC News online. The audience stands around a vast peninsula stage; there’s communal dancing before and after the show; the music pulsates with vigour. It’s a “spirited, spiritual production”. And yet it’s painfully telling that no writer is listed in the credits. The sorry truth is that “the writing is not very good. At best it is prosaic; at worse, plain bad.” The jokes are corny, there’s “not a memorable phrase in the piece”, and the script leaves the very able acting ensemble looking “wooden and awkward”.
That’s too harsh, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. The writing certainly has its flaws. The young protagonist, Kaelo, for example, is presented as a bright, intelligent guy – yet he appears quite “taken aback” to discover aspects of South Africa’s violent past and current divisions that are “common knowledge”. Even so, Tree boasts excellent performances, notably from Alfred Enoch as Kaelo and Sinéad Cusack as his Afrikaner grandmother. And with its music and dance – plus Jon Bausor’s vibrant design, and projections giving us vistas of the veld – it offers a “kaleidoscopic spectacle” that makes up for its dramatic deficiencies.