For Black Boys, Six Black Men, Thrilling Audiences Live at the Apollo

• Date: 6^th April 2023
• Venue: Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1
• Play: For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy
• Rating: *****
• Writer & Director: Ryan Calais Cameron
• Produced by: The Royal Court  Theatre, Nouveau Riche and New Diorama Theatre

Good theatre can excite for a wide variety of reasons, or it can be simply down to a few things such as acting and stage set exceptionally well. For Black Boys has it all with its engaging, enthralling story line told in a combined straight play and musical format. Essentially the focus is a group therapy session for 6 young Black men as they share their lives, experiences, worries and concerns. Worthy and serious as that sounds this is not your traditional style of covering serious themes.

The play is acted out in such an uplifting, joyous manner that you could almost forget there are quite a number of weighty issues being tackled head on. From the start and throughout you warm to and feel invested in the 6 characters – Midnight (Kaine Lawrence, Jet (Nnabiko Ejimofor) Pitch (Emmanuel Akwafo), Onyx (Mark Akintimehin), Sable (Darragh Hand) and Obsidian (Aruna Jalloh). We soon to get to find out a little about who they are – student, road man, hard man, professional, the womaniser etc… They banter and rib one another mercilessly given half the chance. There’s an endearing warmth to their camaraderie. The men are largely full of youthful bravado and machismo, whether that’s regaling with tales of chirpsing girls, how many women they’ve slept with or their annoying, frustrating stop and search encounters with the police. There’s a brilliantly funny and witty real laugh out loud joke when a comparison is made between fire-fighters, ambulance crew and police officers. A cutting observation made in a hilariously unexpected way.

There’s a lot  more unexpected humour dropped in alongside the pathos and above all joyfulness of the production. A surprising amount of music, dancing and singing  features as a vehicle for relating the six young men’s stories. For Black Boys is a wonderful combination of regular and musical theatre styles in a heady, fruity and mesmerising concoction. In fact, Playwright Ryan Calais Cameron’s inspiration for this show, the late Ntozake Shange, actually coined the phrase ‘choreopoem’ to describe her ground breaking dramatic form, combining poetry, dance, music, and song in the forerunner to For Black Boys ‘For Coloured Girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf’ (1975) that chronicled the lives of women of colour in the United States of America.

Amidst all the jokes, banter and braggadocio, issues are raised concerning relationships, being single, child abuse, what it is to be a Black man, racism and stop and search, to the extent that whilst your laughing or are shocked by what you see and hear, it also makes you stop and think.

There’s a simplicity to the 2 level set that doesn’t distract, but leaves the focus solely on the actors. The show lends itself easily to audience participation (of the welcome good type not ‘The Bodyguard’ Manchester type – Good Friday 7 April 2023). There was a great moment when the guys were trying to guess the nationality of one of the men’s new girlfriend and a woman in the Upper Circle hopefully shouted out “Ghanaian” and it turned out she was – queue great laughter.

Act II goes deeper and is effectively but subtly the set piece group therapy session at which the guys truly and much more sincerely open up to one another. Based on Act I you expect them to rib one another and thus be reticent to open up, but there’s little of that which raises the stakes to a higher level as the bravado is stripped back to reveal true thoughts and feelings about who they are, what is really troubling them to such an extreme extent that, alluding to the show’s full title, thoughts of suicide rear their ugly head. It’s very moving and in a way just as this comes as a big surprise after the playfulness of Act I, it mirrors how things can be in real life as it’s not always evident that people are considering “suicide when the hue gets too heavy” as many will mask their true feelings of desperation, burying such dark feelings and thoughts so deeply within their souls that it comes as a huge and tragic surprise when they do act on those deepest, darkest thoughts.

A number of the men seem to have suffered from lack of a father figure in their lives and in particular from a lack of love more generally. That is one of the big themes of ‘For Black Boys’. How the absence of love leads young men to seek love in other ways, a somewhat arguably toxic hyper masculinity – womanising, viewing success as the number of women they can bed, rather than the quality of relationship and developing one successful relationship to its logical conclusion, whether that is a settled monogamous relationship, marriage and/or creating and raising a family together.

There’s a scene where one of the men comes out a little leftfield as being gay. There was nothing to suggest he was that way included judging by Act 1, but perhaps that was exactly the point. Due to societal norms and black male culture, being gay has been traditionally frowned upon, such that he could only come out in the “safe space” of a group therapy session. Nonetheless it seemed out of kilter with the storyline and character’s development up to that point. Black culture is not typically one that embraces homosexuality and therefore in a play featuring just 6 men, it seemed a million miles from being an accurate, balanced or fair representation statistically of the black male experience. Only 2.7% of the UK Population identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) according to the 2019 Census. This figure is likely to be an under-estimate due to fears of disclosing sexuality even in an anonymous national census in which 93.7% identified as heterosexual. There has been a great increase in the numbers of men feeling anxious, contemplating ending it all and literally, as this play depicts, seeking therapy to handle living in a society that doesn’t understand or want to understand their lives and lifestyles.

As stated, the headline theme of suicide looms large in Act II in a subtle, not so in your face way you might have expected based on the extremely long title of the play. The message is loud and clear. The value of the therapy was in the talking, a community of men coming together to share experiences in a non-judgmental but supportive way. That just doesn’t happen enough. The future for young men doesn’t have to mean group or even individual therapy (though not a bad idea at all) but at the very least in Black men dropping the façade and opening up and talking to one another in a real way, one that bear fruits in solutions, love and a constructive way forward in tackling the issues they may be battling and bottling up. Suicide may seem the way out but at what cost? What problem does that really solve and who benefits?

Whilst I know the idea for the play was directly inspired by the writer Ryan Calais Cameron having been influenced by Ntozake Shange’s ‘For Coloured Girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (1975)’ the full title is dreadful. The official hash tag of #ForBlackBoys might have been better and easier to say and recall; or some other shorter title that describes the play.

That quibble aside, For Black Boys is a smash hit West End success in its 3^rd incarnation following its debut run at the Diorama Theatre [2021], Royal Court Theatre [2022] and now in 2023 the Apollo theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. For Black Boys has the potential to be a game changer in the demographic of theatre productions and theatre goers in the West End. I’ve never witnessed such love and joy for a play amongst such a wide spectrum (Black, white, men, women, young and middle aged) that I’m seeing For Black Boys on social media. This show is that good, relevant and important that it deserves an extended West End run, national tour and in time a transfer to the bright lights of Broadway where the guys can razzle dazzle audiences in New York.

© Tiemo Talk of the Town

© Photos – Ali Wright

For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy plays the Apollo Theatre for a strictly limited season until 7 May 2023.

Links:

1. Aurie Styla’s Green Agenda – 3 April 2022
2. Will Smith’s Oscars Breakdown – 31st March 2022

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