Tambo and Bones

A Thursday afternoon matinee in a theatre in East London is perhaps not the most auspicious way to see a satire about race, with a particular focus on the American experience, but that was the only date I could manage on this tour with a tiny but mighty cast.

The audience was an interesting mix of older, probably retired people, together with a balancing part of the audience as school children.  One interesting thing though is this play is predicated on the audience being, as usual,  older and mainly white, and this time it wasn’t, having a much wider race profile than usual.  

The play itself is a bit Beckett-ish, particularly at the start, as Tambo (Clifford Samuel) and Bones (Daniel Ward) find themselves as a double act in a dysfunctional minstrel show, trying cheating, then reason and eventually more and more dramatic and painful acts to try to get the audience to give them empathy and money as they realise that they are just pawns in a game.  Then we leap forward to the pair as wildly successful rap stars, firing t-shirt cannons as the audience join in with the songs about black pain and oppression.  This makes it sound grim but bizarrely it’s a lot of fun, with loads of audience engagement being demanded of us and being given. The first half ends with a civil war breaking out, setting us up for the second half which is set 400 years in the future.  And here, again with much joshing with the audience, we get to hear a future history from a Black perspective, with a shocking and very surprising ending, designed to turn it all back onto the audience.  What would it be like if you weren’t seen as real or valuable as others?  What if you were murdered without consequence?

This is a powerful play designed to make us think about our own assumptions and prejudices, and it does that very well.  It reminded me a bit of Rhinoceros from a few weeks ago, where the audience are complicit, implicated in what is happening on stage.   Clever stuff, although the switch back to the audience was probably a bit different from usual I think by the demographic being so mixed.  They did have a 'Black-out night' when the play opened in 2023, I wonder how that worked out?

The cast are brilliant in this, the two leads working well as a team, then in the second half the two artists playing white robots (Jaron Lammens and Dru Cripps) were just fantastic too.  

It’s touring for a little while yet and it’s definitely recommended, just be prepared to be unsettled.