Tree – Young Vic Theatre

Sinead Cusack and Alfred Enoch in Tree at the Young Vic Theatre, London. Picture: Marc Brenner

Tree continues at the Young Vic Theatre, London until 24 August 2019.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

It begins and ends with a party – a deafeningly, bone-shakingly loud  South African all-shouting, all-dancing immersive gig. The 90 minutes in between present the story of one, rather complicated family as means of exploring recent history.

This isn’t musical theatre in the usual sense of the term. It’s a show which uses haunting music and evocative singing (by Michael ‘Mikey J’Asante) along with physical theatre to tell a powerful story.

With the Young Vic auditorium configured more or less in the round and most of the audience standing nearby, there is a sense of everyone in the room being part of the events unfolding.

Kaelo (Alfred Enoch – good) is the bi-racial son of a white South African mother (Lucy Briggs-Owen – also impressive) who came to London when apartheid was at its height and raised the boy as a single parent.

Now that his mother has died, Kaelo goes to South Africa to scatter her ashes on his unknown father’s grave and to meet, for the first time, his farm-owner grandmother (Sinead Cusack).

Inevitably he learns a lot about his parents, his grandparents and the atrocities which have studded the evolution of South Africa. There are a number of flashbacks. It’s a powerful story although the script is laboured and clunky in places.

The quality of acting is high and the characterisation mostly works well. Cusack makes the crusty, blinkered grandmother very believable although I was unconvinced by her white South African accent and her Afrikaans speaking.

The two best things in this show are the ensemble dancing and the set. Gregory Maqoma’s choreography has a group of dancers representing South African ancestors moving with balletic passion and creating compelling exotic shapes.

The set (by Jon Bausor) includes a huge circular ring – like a giant lampshade high above the playing space on to the inside of which images and shapes are projected. And there’s a very dramatic and beautiful development at the end. No spoilers but the piece isn’t called “Tree” for nothing.

Susan Elkin