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.
