A coming-of-age drama, a critique of colonialism, a piano gig and a love story – Anoushka Lucas packs a lot into her wittily probing one-hour solo show. A singer-songwriter who found that huge early praise and promise don’t always translate into success, Lucas reinvented herself as a riveting stage actress, and will reprise her stunning lead role in Oklahoma! when it transfers from the Young Vic to the West End next year. Meanwhile, here, she proves herself a hugely promising writer too.
Her first play – she previously penned a short response to George Floyd’s murder for the Bush in 2020 – surely draws inspiration from her own upbringing, and the knockbacks and humiliations she suffered in the music industry. Lucas plays Lylah, a working-class girl of French, English, Cameroonian and Indian heritage, who passes among the upper-middle class thanks to musical talent, pushy parents, and an education at a London Lycee then Oxford.
The elephant in her family’s one-bed council flat – in a Victorian house, not an estate, she clarifies, in the first of many challenges to lazy assumptions – is her piano. A means of escape and expression, its mahogany frame and ivory keys also make it an emblem of imperial plunder. The brutal extraction and subsequent segmentation and refinement of an elephant’s tusk becomes a metaphor for the way historic atrocities are whitewashed by later generations who inherit the spoils.
Lucas flits from era to era. First Lylah is seven, gawping as the flat’s windows are removed to bring in the piano. Then 26, avidly courted by record companies. Then 29, hitting a professional wall and realising how much separates her from the privileged upbringing of her drummer lover. The plangent, soulful-pop compositions she has written and expertly plays punctuate and illuminate the action. She has specified that for each future production, new music should be composed, and that Lylah must be played by a pianist.
What’s most pleasing about the show is the way Lucas teases out associations, contradictions and complications in areas of class, culture and ethnicity, as well as her exquisite delivery. Given the emotional exposure required by the story, she’s very funny, but she can also switch on an implacable gaze that has you immediately examining your conscience. She subtly alters her body language for each iteration of Lylah and – less subtly – her accent for impersonations of the wider family.
Jess Edwards is credited with developing as well as directing the show, but not everything in her production works. The disembodied voices of music execs telling Lylah to sound less white and more “urban” are a clumsy device: the mime-style writhings these insults prompt in Lyrah even clumsier. But Lucas is a performer of rare charisma and her first full play is a teasing, provoking pleasure. I’ve seen three shows each lasting an hour this week: this is the only one I wanted to be longer.
