Once on This Island – Southwark Playhouse

Picture: Elza Wilmot

Once on This Island continues at Southwark Playhouse, London until 31 August 2019.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

There’s more than an air of Romeo and Juliet to the tale at the heart of Once on This Island, the latest musical in the British Theatre Academy’s summer takeover of the Southwark Playhouse. In Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s musical set in the French Antilles, the star-cross’d lovers are Ti Moune, an orphaned peasant girl, and Daniel, scion of the community of descendants of the French colonisers.

But this is no mere transposition from Verona to the Caribbean. The entire tale is being told and retold by the island villagers, in a tradition of oral history where, after generations of retelling, ancient Vodou gods rub shoulders with motor cars. Director Lee Proud creates an atmospheric environment in which to tell the tale, configuring the Playhouse’s large space into a traverse configuration so that the audience always feel close to the storytelling.

Proud’s characteristically exuberant choreography, too, contributes a huge amount to the scene-setting, mimicking Flaherty and Ahrens’ score in being a living emulation of Caribbean rhythms.

Within this folklore settings, some performances are ebulliently grandiose – particularly Jonathan Chen’s Asaka, a gender fluid Earth Mother god/dess, whose ‘Mama Will Provide’ is a highlight. Marie-Anna Caufour’s Euralie, the woman who adopts the orphan Ti Moune, also gets a chance to demonstrate an impressive belt.

But there is delicacy, too. Firstly in Aviva Tulley’s performance as Erzulie, the Goddess of Love, whose challenge to Papa Ge, the god of Death (Martin Cush) precipitates Ti Moune and Daniel’s meeting, as the Gods try to discern which of them is the more powerful. Tulley has a demeanour of calm assertiveness throughout, Erzulie being well aware her abilities outweigh anything else. That performance blossoms in her vocal work, too, culminating with a beautiful rendition of ‘The Human Heart’ (accompanied, as the rest of the show’s songs, by musical director Chris Ma and his six-piece band).

But it is Chrissie Bhima’s Ti Moune who truly lifts the heart, and also breaks it. Her orphan girl is a wide-eyed, beaming, trusting naïf, who upon discovering the injured Daniel insists on caring for him in defiance of her adoptive parents’ wishes. She complements Sam Tutty’s Daniel well, the latter struggling with a much less clearly-defined character.

Indeed, in this morality folk tale all the human characters risk becoming something of a cipher. But they are not the focus: it is the story as a whole who is the true star, with a magical ending to Ti Moune’s story that demonstrates that by allowing Erzulie’s love to dominate, barriers between communities can be broken down in literal, and poetic, ways.

One of the key aspects to such folk tales is that they are told, and retold, handed on from generation to generation. And so Proud and the British Theatre Academy have created a new telling of the tale, appropriating the odd trick and embellishment from previous restagings of the work and yet creating something new.

It is a production that will ensure the tale continues to be told, and retold, with love.

Scott Matthewman