Bus journeys have long held freighted racial histories, from Rosa Parks’ stand in Alabama to the Bristol bus boycott and, most bleakly, Stephen Lawrence’s murder at a bus stop on 22 April 1993.
This last event is the underlying tragedy to which this production is pinned, although it journeys through time and inflects our present with several pasts and parallel universes. Conceived by Mojisola Adebayo, Roy Williams and Matthew Xia, and directed by Xia, it is a surreal, captivating and ultimately life-affirming ride, constructed as a bus journey from Deptford to Woolwich. We are ushered on to the double-decker by a warmly bossy conductor (Llewella Gideon, irresistibly likable) from a bygone age.
