Garrick Theatre, til 1 June

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Calais Cameron earns his place in the literary canon with this beautifully written, beautifully human show.

There are some plays that stand the test of time. Shakespeare’s lovers resonate with us after 400 years; Williams’ Southern ingenues are products of their era and yet our hearts still break for them today. When a play is written well, really well – when the beauty of the language jumps off the page – it becomes a classic worthy of study. I believe For Black Boys, at once a contemporary social commentary and an exploration of timeless human themes, will join this literary canon.

The play’s full name is For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy, and it’s explicitly a treatise on the experience of young Black men living in Britain today. Playwright Ryan Calais Cameron has said it was penned as his response to the similarly named chorepoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, by Ntozake Shange. What we see is an ongoing conversation between six essentially allegorical characters; despite what it might say in the programme, on stage it is never revealed where they are, how they know each other, or even their names. Somewhere in their late teens or early twenties, their discussion swings effortlessly between reminiscences, laments, confessions, and heated debates, and often dips into flashbacks. 

Without a central, driving narrative for us to hold on to, in the hands of a mediocre writer this play would fall flat on its face. But thanks to Calais Cameron’s extraordinary storytelling flair, the audience remains enraptured throughout. He pulls off a kind of magic trick with language that is completely accessible and natural, but also poetic and haunting in the play’s more serious moments. And it does get serious, very serious; the characters’ flashbacks run the full gamut of trauma, including domestic abuse, knife crime, the legacy of slavery and complicated fathers. It’s always moving but never cliched, with each character offering a unique perspective on his Blackness. As one character says in the first act, “We are not a monolith”, and Calais Cameron expertly avoids reducing the Black experience to a single narrative, instead presenting a nuanced and complex portrait. 

Contributing to this sense of nuance, and part of what makes the play so powerful and engaging, is that every character speaks entirely for himself, often directly to us. Calais Cameron’s writing style ensures these exhortations are always sincere and moving – we don’t feel like we’re being monologued at, even though we frequently are. This sense is aided by the fact that the characters constantly challenge each other, which I thought made for some of the most interesting scenes: particularly effective is the disagreement about whether the n-word is ever acceptable, or when two of the boys compare parallel stories of their fathers’ lives (one a hero and one a villain).

What’s also striking is that this very serious and moving play (with the word ‘suicide’ in the title) manages to be extraordinarily entertaining as well. There are times when it’s very, very funny – the crowd at my performance went absolutely wild at the start of the second act when the boys woo various women in the audience. This is accompanied by a stunningly good rendition of ‘No Diggity’ followed by a very well-performed dance number. The whole show is peppered with music breaks (often for R&B classics of the past 30 years), to the point where you could almost describe the whole thing as an out-and-out musical. The soundtrack is used incredibly effectively, from pop numbers through to contemporary dance and beautiful vocal harmonies; it’s by turns hilarious and moving, and really grounds the story with a sense of time and place.

The musical prowess of the cast is pretty evident, but their talents don’t end there. Every actor gives a standout performance, finding rage but also vulnerability – even the tough-as-nails badman and seemingly cocky lothario are given touching humanity by Tobi King Bakare and Albert Magashi respectively. There’s a beautiful chemistry between all six, and this undoubtedly stems in part from Calais Cameron’s script (the increasingly frequent moments when the boys hold each other in grief are extraordinarily poignant). But it’s the performers who breathe it into life. When the curtain rose after the final scene they were all standing arm-in-arm, and perhaps I’m just a sucker, but it seemed to me a genuine moment of connection between the six actors. 

Whether I’m projecting or the cast have indeed developed a special bond while performing this show, in either case it speaks to the power of Calais Cameron’s storytelling. I’ve never been to another play where the audience reacted so strongly to the material – during my Saturday evening performance the auditorium was filled with a constant murmur of agreement, concern, laughter and grief. I couldn’t help but reflect on just how powerful it is for theatres to champion a truly diverse range of stories, allowing new audiences to find something that resonates with them in a way perhaps no theatre show has before. And I’m not just talking about Black audiences; one of Calais Cameron’s extraordinary feats here is that he has created a play that is explicitly, unapologetically ‘for Black boys’, while also tapping into some universal and profound human themes. I feel certain this play will be remembered – and studied, and loved – for a very long time to come.