Nicholle Cherrie and Nathan Queeley-Dennis in Black Love at the Kiln Theatre, London. Picture: Camilla Greenwell
Black Love continues at the Kiln Theatre, London until 23 April 2022.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Black Love is a musical exploration and celebration of its namesake written and directed by Chinonyerem Odimba. Odimba was inspired to make this piece after overhearing two men discussing Black women disparagingly in a supermarket, then finding herself having to battle internally before raising her voice in objection.
The play begins with Nicholle Cherrie’s Aurora (or Roo to her closest) singing tributes to her vagina. This is a show in which a Black woman will share her voice in a way not everyone in the audience may be used to. Beyond the characters on stage, this voice is Odimba’s, whose determination to bring into light what is too often held in darkness permeates the entire script. Sometimes too strong or too obvious an authorial voice can be to a play’s detriment, but here it feels absolutely necessary. This is a yell against a centuries-long silencing.
Aurora’s flatmate is her brother Orion, played by Nathan Queeley-Dennis. Through their affectionate chats we learn that they are coming to terms with the recent loss of their mother. Orion is also attempting to find his way into the overwhelmingly white world of acting, while Aurora is on a journey of spiritual self-discovery and healing. Odimba’s writing is efficient in establishing these recognisable and multi-layered characters as a cohesive family, and the audience is immediately brought on side. The entrance of an intruder into this functioning dynamic is almost shocking…
As the show’s third onstage character Lois, Beth Elliott exudes an entitled, vampiric whiteness that is disturbingly familiar. Though delightfully shaded by Aurora as “Becky with the bland hair”, she quickly becomes Orion’s girlfriend. She harbours an exoticised, fetishised idea of a relationship with a Black man, and she chips away at Orion and Aurora’s lives until she is living in their apartment, wearing their dead mother’s clothes, and mocking their cultural traditions. In Elliott’s hands, this character is monstrous in her privilege and insensitivity, but performed with consummate comic brilliance.
In fact, the entire cast has fine comedy chops and the show is much funnier than one might expect given the weight of its themes. It exists to shine a spotlight on the joy of Black love and Black families, and Cherrie and Queeley-Dennis are masterful in sharing this exuberance with the audience. Cherrie has some sequences of interpretive dance that enrapture, and throughout she draws the Kiln Theatre’s in-the-round audience into the centre with her. The heart she gives Aurora over the play’s hour and a half run-time is beautiful. As well as Queeley-Dennis’ excellent comic timing, he delivers great nuance as he battles internal conflict over the widening schism in his family and the pressure on him to sell out his values to realise his dreams in acting. Three person casts have a history going right back to the Ancient Greek origins of theatre, and this trio is a perfectly balanced dream team.
Odimba also writes the lyrics, with the show’s music composed by Ben and Max Ringham. The duo has crafted a musical soundscape of hypnotic beats and extended Rhodes piano chords that is cohesive and distinctive. Whether the scenes contain comedy or tragedy, politics or slapstick, poetry or interpretive dance – the Ringhams’ score is always there to tie it all together. The focus is never on big, technically ostentatious showstoppers, but all three of the cast are very capable singers and they create no shortage of beautiful musical moments.
Black Love’s reliance on dialogue rather than song to progress the plot distinguishes it from more “traditional” musical theatre, but of course this isn’t a show concerned with fitting neatly into people’s preconceived notions. Its use of music (not just the songs – there are beautiful moments of underscoring and diegetic sound-tracking) is effective and lends the show an abundance of power. A story about only one side of a subject is never satisfying, and the same would apply to a straight play that ignored the music that is clearly so important to these characters’ lives.
Another key architect of the show’s success is sound designer Joel Price, whose abstract electronic noise collages heighten moments of tension and add drama to scene transitions. Contemporary theatre increasingly seems to be looking to the work of mid 20th century avant-garde composers and the musique concrete movement to grab audiences’ attention, and long may this continue.
Another impactful aural element of the show is the playback of interviewees describing what ‘Black love’ means to them. This is woven into the experience of the piece in such a way that it intensifies the fictional stories we see on stage. Family drama is universal; tension is universal; love is universal; but these real and specific accounts of Black experience lend this show its greater weight.
It was interesting to experience the different reactions in the audience – which moments cut deeper or elicited gasps or laughs from different people. As a white man I experienced powerful moments of self-reflection, but I don’t doubt there were lines that went over my head and jokes I missed. Significantly though, I doubt there was a single member of the audience who watched the show and felt nothing. There were plenty of laughs and plenty of tears, and plenty of fascinating discussions in the bar afterwards. Black Love has something important to say to whomsoever is lucky enough to see it on its relatively short London run. It is original and masterful in its dissection of this moment in culture and society, as well as unashamedly packed with joy and heart and truth.
Ian Bowkett
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