FringeReview UK 2024
Sutura Gayle The Legends of Them
Royal Court Theatre Presents a Hackney Showroom production originated with Brixton House
Genre: Adaptation, Biographical Drama, Contemporary, Historical, LGBT Theatre, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Musical Theatre, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
“A track called Three Weeks Gone (Mi Giro) by a new artist called Lorna Gee” calls out Tony Williams and Sutara Gayle AKA Lorna Gee hears her first single debut from Holloway prison. Originally presented at Brixton House last year, Gayle’s The Legends of Them finally gets the larger space many clamoured for. It features all parts performed and sung performed by Gayle too. Directed by co-creator (with Nina Lyndon) Jo McInnes it runs at Royal Court Theatre’s Downstairs till December 21st.
A portable world everyone should hear. Stunning.
Review
“A track called Three Weeks Gone (Mi Giro) by a new artist called Lorna Gee” calls out Tony Williams and Sutara Gayle AKA Lorna Gee hears her first single debut from Holloway prison. Originally presented at Brixton House last year, Gayle’s The Legends of Them finally gets the larger space many clamoured for. It features all parts performed and sung performed by Gayle too. Directed by co-creator (with Nina Lyndon) Jo McInnes it runs at Royal Court Theatre’s Downstairs till December 21st.
Though to reduce Gayle’s extraordinary worlds to such dramatic moments makes it sound more paradoxical than it is, Gayle’s constructed a narrative of intense brightness and shade, tragedy inflecting the huge comedy. Though autobiographical it doesn’t proceed with neat linear tidiness: more it’s a series of invocations as of need. When heard, it often seems the only way to tell Gayle’s history.
The title calls on how Gayle inflects her life to call on her mother Euphemia who came from Jamaica with nothing; her brother and spiritual guide, Tony, later Mooji whose voice gently punctures the air. There’s Nanny her grandmother whose traditional values interrogate Gayle’s own discoveries of herself. And her sister Cherry whose fate is burnt onto the video projected at the back of the Court’s stripped-back walls. There’s a connection with Brixton House too.
Indeed with virtually no set bar a few chairs, the theatre itself is mostly plunged into dark and Joshie Harriette’s remarkable lighting sculpts into the set itself, playing in revelatory white over Gayle and Melissa Simon-Hartman’s costumes and Tyler Forward’s projection and Daniel Betters’ video art, or carving red and green out of reversals of fortune or theme. A gallery behind where occasional lighting patterns emerge also smokes with atmosphere and at a crucial moment Gayle emerges there for what feels like a benediction.
To Christella Litras’ connective tissue of through music taking in Gayle’s own, Gaye punctuates her narrative with sweeps of the mic into song. It’s the best kind of overwhelming and always clear: Elena Peña ensures the right sound emerges: instrumentally clear, densely atmospheric. There are points where a text to pick everything up is mandatory. It’s a rich alternating current: poetically arranged with interludes, tickly one-liners and storytelling with punch and wit.
There’s superbly constructed moments, such as Gayle’s multiple expulsion from schools, for asking a single question, or the dark badinage of being inducted as a rapper into Globe’s world. Globe isn’t the world you need, and soon nudges Gayle into a lifestyle of sexual coercion (which she resists) and scoring drugs: Gayle’s innate strength resists many pressures but her own, and the sphere of medication and the psychiatrist “I’m on your side” morphs through Cherry’s household, including Linton Kwesi Johnson and coming out to Euphemia upholder of Seventh Day Adventist values so Leviticus is cited.
If Holloway seems picaresque with the discovery of a gallimaufry of friends “you lot just went missing” and Carmen’s affirmation, the circumstance surrounding Cherry’s murderous shooting by the Met (who else?) is both connected (systemic state racism) and an opposite experience in every way. Stark video projection and sound tells everything plainly, burning away the deep atmospherics Gayle elsewhere builds.
Any redemption from such grief and outrage might seem not just impossible but painful to contemplate. Brixton House emerges from the second Brixton Riots of 1985, sparked by this shooting. Historical and personal are fused. That Gayle counterpoints throughout though is the non-chronological interventions of brother Mooji. His meditations intersect one world with another. Another video at the end involves a special burning.
Though not ideally clear and with details that can get occasionally lost, the impact is electric. Gayle raps, speaks, sings shouts – a primal scream seems mandatory after you’ve heard all this: nothing less will do. You wonder at what peace Gayle has made with the earth. Her performance too is both mercurial and majestic, in moments both. Gayle’s coloratura vocals too soar above the instrumentals.
Though originally produced on the fired earth of what’s now Brixton House, this Hackney Showroom production proves it’s a portable world of 80 minutes everyone should hear. Stunning.
Written by Sutara Gayle AKA Lorna Gee, Director and Co-Creator Jo McInnes, Co-Creator Nina Lyndon, Costume Designer Melissa Simon-Hartman and Lighting Design Joshie Harriette, Composer and Musical Director Christella Litras, Sound Designer Elena Peña, Projection Designer Tyler Forward, Live Sound Consultant Tony Gayle, Video Artist Daniel Betters
Associate Designer Jaimie Todd, Assistant Director Sam Curtis Lindsay, Associate Artist Martina Laird,
Stage Manager Phyllys Egharevba,, DSM Reuben Bojang Sound & Music assistant Christian Gayle, Session Musicians Leroy Johnson & Scratch Professor
Executive Producer Steven Atkinson, Lead Producer Hannah Lyal, Production Manager Marius Renning
