Nicholle Cherrie (Roo) and Nathan Queeley-Dennis (Orion) in Black Love
(Picture: Camilla Greenwell)A lush, wraparound, jazz-funk keyboard soundtrack provides the spine for this chamber musical, a jubilant celebration of black affection and identity tempered by white interference. It’s a likeable, often joyful but ultimately lopsided show, part family story and part polemic. Writer-director Chinonyerem Odimba has been working on the book and lyrics for two years with composers Ben and Max Ringham, and a bit more time is needed before it fully zings.
Sister and brother Roo (Nicholle Cherrie) and Orion (Nathan Queeley-Dennis) are bound close by the memory of their parents’ passionate marriage, and the flat they were bequeathed. For them, black love involves “more than blood, more than just fam”. But a rift opens when actor Orion falls for white Lois (Beth Elliott) at a festival – she helps him look for Roo, who’s off her face on magic mushrooms - then takes on a role in a play that proves deeply compromising.
Is Ru wrong to be furious about what she regards as her brother’s race betrayal? How much pride should Orion sacrifice for love and professional advancement? These questions are set against a frank and witty musical celebration of sex and filial tenderness. Roo and Orion reveal their inner thoughts, sometimes in asides and sometimes in voice-over, but most effectively in song.
Odimba takes playful delight in language. “How has this caucacity occurred?” asks Roo encountering a post-coital Lois. Rehearsing a speech, Orion stumbles repeatedly over the word “peonies”. Her phrasing, in lyrics and dialogue, is beautifully succinct. “You moved right in on what’s not yours,” says Roo, the line embracing her brother, her flat, and centuries of history. The Ringham brothers are pioneers of 3D soundscapes in theatre and their score here is enveloping. It’s like being submerged in a molten and particularly fruity concept album.
But the opposition that the script sets up between the women is crude and leaves Orion lacking agency as a character. Roo, surrounded by crystals and incense, encourages other black women to celebrate their sexuality and their genitals. “Yoni, hoo-hoo, punani,” she chants, before a song in praise of the vagina. Lois seems like a nice girl but her interest in black men and black culture is nakedly vampiric. References to George Floyd and a roll-call of dead black men and women are meant to highlight the culture of dismissal the show hopes to counter, but they feel shoehorned in.
Odimba’s company tiata fahodzi co-produced the show with the Kiln and Paines Plough, and her in-the-round staging is intimate and welcoming. The three performers generate a warm rapport with the audience and each other. Their singing is pleasing and heartfelt rather than West-End glossy but that adds to the charm. The celebratory tone is at odds with the issues, though, and when the audience was encouraged to dance at the end, few did.
Kiln Theatre, to 23 April; kilntheatre.com
