In 2005, long before he became Marvel’s Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman was a young playwright and theatre director who penned this verse play in response to the murder of a fellow black student Prince Jones by a black police officer. Inspired by Shakespeare and the Hip Hop theatre movement of the early 2000s, there’s a Greek influence too in the form of a beatboxing, popping and locking onstage chorus. There’s too much going on here conceptually, too little plot, for a show that runs almost three hours.
Interestingly the focus is less on the murdered Deep than on his bulimic girlfriend Azure, who is the best written character and given vivid dimensional life by Selina Jones. Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu’s British premiere production has moments of alchemical power and is alert to the jagged and unpredictable nature of grief. But he seems too in awe of Boseman - who commanded near universal respect and love and who died of colon cancer aged 43 in 2020 – to curb the play’s excesses.
In hindsight, Deep (Jayden Elijah) seems to be an unwitting self-portrait of the man Boseman would become: a natural leader, imbued with grace, cut down too young. He earned his nickname due to the depth of his soul and Christian belief, manifested in his work for a community centre. He, wannabe-actress Azure, DJ Roshad and “fugitive recovery agent” (aka bounty hunter) Tone were all recent graduates of Mecca University (the nickname for Washington’s historically black Howard University, which Boseman and Jones attended), struggling to make it in New York. Now the three survivors wait to see if Deep’s killer will be indicted. (Big surprise: he isn’t.)
It takes a while to work all this out, however. The play begins with the ensemble filtering through the audience and onto a candlelit stage filled with silver spheres, impersonating phone ringtones before they start body-popping, humming and mouth-drumming. They’re dressed in futuristic tracksuits that have been cut up and stitched haphazardly together, in a way that makes them look like toy soldiers. Apart from Aminata Francis and Imani Yahshua, playing chorus leaders/vocalists Street Knowledge of Good and Street Knowledge of Evil, who wear silvery space-disco regalia. WTF?
Much of the backstory is laboriously laid out in the prolonged verbal sparring between apparently easygoing Tone (Elijah Cook) and the vengeful Roshad (Justice Ritchie), but not before they’ve meandered into a lyrical digression on the death of Rasputin. Eventually, we realise Tone has the hots for Azure.
If the themes of love, death, revenge and jealousy are given a Shakespearean level of poetic prestige, the structure is all hip-hop, full of lolloping, clever internal rhymes and fluent lyricism. “The joke of rapture is there is more laughter hereafter,” Deep says in one of his periodic spectral appearances, more like Hamlet than Old Hamlet’s ghost.
It turns out Azure’s eating disorder predated his death: a means for her to exercise control over her sexualisation by men. Her shape is evoked by Deep as the changing faces of the moon, “from full to quarter to crescent”. She is powerless in the grip of her illness: “What I want to do/I do not/What I hate, I do”. Boseman’s writing is often beautiful and evocative, particularly when describing Azure’s relationship with Deep, as sitcom-romantic as it was sexually-charged. Then he’ll write a scene where she performs a terpsichorean act of spiritual rebirth dressed in a leotard and butterfly wings, based on a story Deep wrote for their unborn children.
The second half begins with the chorus dressed as garish majorettes, performing a medley of popular and traditional hits so protracted I thought maybe that was it for the rest of the show. But no, there is a kind of resolution, reached through a charged recreation of Deep’s killing and a car journey that’s pregnant with menace. There’s a fiery denouement then the script drivels on for another ten minutes before petering out. This is an ambitious, unfocused work by a young writer exploring the reach of his talent. It contains hints of what Boseman might have written had he not been sidetracked into movie stardom and died cruelly young.
