Black Matter – Crazy Coqs

Picture: Dan Poole

Black Matter is available to stream on demand from 24-31 March 2021.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and other crimes against people of colour, last year’s Black Lives Matter protests coincided with a pandemic lockdown, resulting in a conflict of personal isolation and the need to express unity in the face of oppression.

West End actor Giles Terera has taken the whirling tornado of emotion he felt in 2020 and created a one-man musical show, Black Matter, recorded at London’s Crazy Coqs.

Accompanying himself, first on guitar and later on piano, Terera gets to demonstrate his phenomenal singing voice – well known to theatregoers from shows from Avenue Q and The Rat Pack: Live in Last Vegas to Hamilton, where his portrayal of Aaron Burr won him an Olivier Award – but also his bona fides as a confident, accomplished songwriter.

Numbers such as the titular opening number and its follow up, the seemingly breezy ‘Be Good to Yourself’, illustrate the struggle of trying to maintain one’s mental health in the face of both an isolating pandemic and a world where the constant drip, drip of racism has started to overflow.

This is a highly personal song cycle, as evinced by ‘The Flats’, a paean to the area of London in which Terera grew up and which feels abandoned by those in power. And in ‘You Have the Right’, inspired by Terera witnessing a street altercation where the police had to be alerted by other witnesses not to make assumptions based on the skin colour of those involved, is a half-spoken, half-sung call to stand up and be counted.

Terera’s set list is expertly arranged, following up such a political anthem with both the breezily romantic ‘Shadowlark’ and ‘Nikki’, a slice of sibling affection served up with a piano style that reminds one of Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder.

Crazy Coqs has been the venue for many online streamed events over the past year, but none have felt quite right, often because they have been lit as they might with an in-person audience present. Here, director Dan Poole focuses the lighting solely on Terera, his surroundings falling away into darkness. It literally throws a spotlight on Terera, to stunning effect.

And that is mirrored by the spotlight Terera throws on British society and its failings. One of the most poignant of such numbers is ‘A Picture of Britain’, celebrating the all-too-short life of photographer Khadija Saye, whose work explored her Gambian-British identity. Saye lost her life in the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, and the reasons behind how so many people of colour were put at risk, and lost, is indeed a picture of Britain.

There can be no doubt that Black Matter feels like a highly personal project of passion for Terera. It’s also one that connects intimately, strongly and steadfastly with the hearts of its audiences as well.

Scott Matthewman