PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

The Brewery, Bristol (Tue 1-Sat 12 Nov)

PERFORMANCE / POETRY This brief but atmospheric evening consists of four actors enacting poems by Bristol poet/playwright/performer Edson Burton (also at the Alma Tavern this week and next with Raising Kamila) under the direction of former Rondo Theatre supremo-turned-top-director-for-hire Andy Burden.

Burton’s poems address, essentially, the Jamaican story – from the journeys to the island from West Africa on the 18^th century slave ships, via generations of familiarity with the new homeland, its wildlife, contrasts and unique energy; and onto the experiences of mid-20^th century immigration to Britain. Burton’s poems function as lyrical tableaux which the cast perform with great physical energy and clear-eyed intensity. In particular, Lorna Easy is a confident, booming materfamilias, while Joe Shire and Shvorne Marks both mix a captivating, can’t-look-away onstage demeanour with lithe athleticism.

Burton’s poems address the traumatic and dehumanising process of slavery, and later the poignant sense of loss and of being lost felt by England’s postwar immigrants. There is, then, much sadness, longing and pain to work through. Also present, though, running like a bright ribbon through the piece, is an unquashable Afro-Caribbean wit, sassiness and confident, swaggering physicality – not to mention a playful, almost Joycean eloquence and delight in words and their twisting.

We hear how, for the Jamaican slaves, “As the light dims/Shadows lengthen into human shapes/We hear the clank of chains/Growls and groans…” and how these mental or muscle memories bleed into more modern generations. Poignantly, later, Andrew Francis plays a 1960s arrival finding work as a conductor on London’s no.71 bus, eager to please and to copy the curious English mannerisms but met only with cold dismissal and worse.

Movingly, another Francis character riffles through his battered suitcase, full of memories, longings and reproaches: a letter demanding ‘When yu a come home?/When yu send fa we?/Let the children know/Dem have a Daddy …’ and mental pictures (conjured by winklepickers and old LPs) of ‘Fierce nights in hazy domino halls’. Quickly, though, the memories are too painful and the suitcase is closed: ‘Enough sartin’ fa now’.

Images, everywhere, are strong and tenacious: backstreet shebeens, quiet Sundays crooning to Nat King Cole, and the “mist-covered mountains and moist forests of home”. The images used to describe postwar British mistrust towards black men, too, tumble out fast and reproachful from Shire’s cocksure but frustrated character: “minstrel or zombie, crack dealer, serial baby maker”. Most powerful, in fact, is a scene in which Marks becomes Casablanca’s (Play it Again,) Sam, a mere entertaining mannequin, his/her hopes and ambitions reduced to the dance of a grinning, dancing puppet.

Not all of the references will be familiar to all audiences. Neither will all the language and metaphors – Burton’s lyrical, emotive and very Caribbean register often needs to be pored over and savoured, not delivered in the fast flush of performance. And there is, at moments, a slight drop in pace and continuity between each little tableau, and a few seconds needed to re-orient ourselves with each new scene and its register, before that one too vanishes. Some backdrop projections of the types of scenes Burton describes were, apparently, mooted for this performance and then rejected: perhaps they might have boosted the sense of context and continuity, though they may equally have distracted from Burton’s fine and beautiful idiom.

All told, though, a charged, febrile, arresting and by turns sombre and exuberant account of the Afro-Caribbean story – and, under Andy Burden’s crisp, pacy direction, a nicely physical  rendering of Burton’s rich lyrical world. (Steve Wright)

Copyright Steve Wright 2011