FringeReview UK 2024

The Lonely Londoners

Jermyn Street Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, Drama, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

It says much for Jermyn Street Theatre that Roy Williams’ latest play premieres here. He’s adapted Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners about the Windrush Generation’s experiences as British citizens: invited to Britain but disinvited at every glance. Directed by Ebenezer Bamgboye it plays till April 6^th.

Williams is a compelling shaper: not just in his co-written (with Clint Dyer) Death of England Trilogy at the National but in stand-alone large-cast masterpieces like his 2002 Sing Yer Heart Out For the Lads, last seen at Chichester in 2022. He knows how to shape the picaresque and strands of this novel to a 100-minute shimmer of fluidity and pure theatre.

In Williams’ hands, dialogue’s often rapid, rapidly delivered; yet there’s monologues directed at others or ambiguously, the audience (moments when the audience double as people stared at). The seven-strong cast effortlessly invoke worlds: mostly London, but with one character left behind in Jamaica.

One of Selvon’s unique strengths is his ear and pioneering replication of Jamaican and Trinidadian patois, with differing registers the cast, aided by dialect coach Aundrea Fudge, kern in each character; often in trying on the absurdities of British RP. And as new arrival Galahad (Romario Simpson), discovers “just say JA for Jamaica” to the Labour Exchange: they’ve never heard of Trinidad.

This from Moses (Gamba Cole) the central still youthful father-figure or fixer round whom everyone constellates. But Moses is disillusioned, though touched Henry Oliver, whom he dubs Galahad, has found him; saving him the journey to Portsmouth.

Moses though has left Christina (Aimee Powell) in Jamaica, and slowly her winding solitude and soaring coloratura voice – half-lament, half-incantation – winds in Moses, as their past’s relived in increasingly terse dialogue. Cole and Powell invoke the otherness of separation, of stark choices sheered from everyone else.

Elsewhere Cole’s tough-tender Moses metes out testy advice, and seeks in occasional prostitutes his only non-male solace.

Otherwise it’s the bleak camaraderie Moses exudes that’s the glue to keeping four men “lonely, but not alone” seeking survival as they move from rented room to room. There’s pigeon pie (a horror to newcomers) with the dark comedy of pigeon-catching – Nevena Stojkov’s movement lining up the men as they float their trap.

In Simpson’s hands Galahad’s an optimist, linguistically confident, navigates with assurance, seeks out work, seeks out a white woman Daisy, and lands in trouble.

There’s the slightly older and increasingly hopeless Big City (Gilbert Kyem Jr). It’s Big City whose rendering of places like Ladbroke Grove needs Moses to work out what he’s saying, Kyem crafting a superb off-kilter pronunciation. Big City though, baffled his ex-RAF status means nothing, can embark on schemes more dangerous than hare-brained – which tightrope on comedy and potential tragedy.

Equally unemployed, despairing Lewis (Tobi Bakare), is hunched, reserved, feeling with reason his entitlement to work. Bakare brings out the man’s intelligence but also his fatal disease skewed by insecurity: jealousy.

Since he’s not alone. Lewis’ magnificently grand-dame mother Tanty (Carol Moses, ramrod judgement incarnate), and Lewis’s wife Agnes (Shannon Hayes) arrive with very different ways with English. There’s the only female relationship as socially confident Agnes who browbeats a market trader for selling rotten merchandise can also teach Tanty tongue-twisters – Hayes radiant with justice and even smiling back at the trader.  But there’s danger in that. Lewis’ passionate love sours and turns in on itself and Agnes.

It’s all captured too in this intimate underground space. Cleverly Laura Ann Price creates a set not of verismo, but varnished decking, upstage raised where actors not in a scene sit on packing cases. Above, Elliot Griggs’ lighting squares off bulbs in ten batteries that riot in and out of colours and shapes across the back wall, often flaring up with a postcode. Its anti-naturalistic bright-lights evocation of London as an atavistic neon monster isn’t lost.

Anett Black’s costumes neatly set off period dress against this, and sound designer Tony Gayle provides a sonic battery of guitar strums, scumbling drums and jarrings haunting out of two worlds. But again it’s Stojkov’s movement that slowly dominates, as both fights are ritualised and then a healing ballet of male tenderness conjures itself. The parallels with Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy are obvious, and surely intentional, down to a group huddle.

There’s only one tiny jar, over the fate of a character that seems a lost opportunity. But Selvon’s magnificently served by Williams, who strands out the stories and semaphores their lightning, tautly rendered by Bamgboye. Theatrically consummate, seven superlative performances pit themselves against a numinous, often hostile London filled with exilic sounds and memories, against which hope springs provisional.  An outstanding production.

Published March 13, 2024 by Simon Jenner