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 f...