A Strange Loop – Barbican Theatre

Kyle Ramar Freeman in A Strange Loop at the Barbican Theatre, London. Picture: Marc Brenner

A Strange Loop continues at the Barbican Theatre until 9 September 2023.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Cognitive scientist and philosopher Douglas Hofstadter first proposed the idea of a strange loop in his work Gödel, Escher, Bach to explore how humanity’s sense of self-identity could have emerged from nothingness. Hofstadter’s strange loop is a tangled hierarchy of layers, each informing and influencing the others, through which one moves until returning to the starting point – by which point, one is the same but also changed.

Hofstadter used examples of Escher’s artwork, Bach’s mathematically-inspired fugues, and more in his exploration of the strange loop concept. To that could also be added Michael R Jackson’s A Strange Loop, the Obie, Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical that has now transferred to the Barbican. Jackson’s work applies Hofstadter’s thesis – and, in keeping with the concept, feeds back into the notion of what s strange loop is, changing it in the process.

The self-referential nature is clear from the start: the hero of Jackson’s musical is a black, queer man called Usher who works as a Broadway usher while writing a musical called A Strange Loop, which is about a black, queer man who is writing a musical called A Strange Loop. Which is about… well, you get the idea.

Kyle Ramar Freeman’s Usher is also arguably the only “real” character on stage. He is joined by a cast of six who play his intrusive thoughts, from feelings of self-loathing to repressed sexuality, and also other characters from Usher’s life – family, agents, theatre patrons and sexual hook-ups. Whether those scenes are manifestations of what this “real” Usher is going through, or the versions the character is writing within his own play, is a malleable concept (more than once, the thoughts break character to voice doubt about why Usher has framed a scene in a particular way).

Much as writers (and some audiences) love works about the arduous task of writing, there is always a risk that such self-referential self-interest can be a little, well, selfish. Thankfully, Jackson’s work has more to say than just about the pain of the artistic process. It is far more interested in Usher’s struggles to be accepted within the prejudices of the gay community – where others dismiss him because he is too fat, too black, too femme – and within his own family, who see his life in New York as a rejection of their churchgoing, God-fearing family and continually harangue Usher with the threat of AIDS.

The very concept of what it means to be a successful black artist is also interrogated. Advisers tell Usher that his musical mustn’t be too black, for fear of alienating white audiences; others that it should be blacker. The biggest target for Jackson’s satire is Tyler Perry, who has made an industry out of stage plays and films set around gospel communities. By tasking Usher with ghost-writing one of the man’s plays, Jackson addresses both Perry’s popularity and financial success, and the distorting effect his work has on what is deemed successful black art.

And yet it is in the context of that work that Usher gets the breakthrough he needs, addressing the aspects of his family life that have moulded him and his various psychoses. The strange loop effect comes through again: the gospel play sequences are complex, multilayered, tangled and transformative.

Director Stephen Brackett initially keeps action fairly focused on Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple set, a series of brick doorways. Initially, one wonders why the Barbican’s expansive stage should be reduced to such small dimensions, but just as Usher begins to expand his musical into interrogations of new areas of his life, Maldonado reveals some flourishes that make use of the space available.

Musically, Jackson positions A Strange Loop very much in the modern New York style of musical theatre writing. His melodies and lyrical rhyming structures have a lot in common with, say, the works of Andrew Lippa or Jason Robert Brown. But it seems unlikely that JRB songs would ever be quite so critically introspective and self-examining – especially when the protagonist has trouble liking what he sees when looking inside.

Jackson has a refreshingly frank attitude to sex and sexuality in his songwriting, too. Unlike the Disney musical Usher works at, A Strange Loop is unashamedly adult in content. At times it’s an uncomfortable watch, especially when dealing with familial homophobia and anti-HIV propaganda.

But Usher learns that writing, or living, without fear has no worth. So it is for audiences too: A Strange Loop is challenging for us in many ways and on many levels. And by the time we emerge from its tangled hierarchy of layers, we may be returned from New York to the Barbican: back where we started – but we are changed. We, too, have been transformed by a strange loop.

Scott Matthewman