Review: Tambo & Bones, Stratford East

Stratford East is a great venue that often acts as a gateway for diverse work, reaching not only its well-served local audience but also inviting new faces and minds to see different worlds. It’s here that in Tambo & Bones playwright Dave Harris presents us with an almost immersive, urgent insight into the Black experience. This is a brilliantly complex, entertaining yet challenging play, both superbly produced and performed.

Tambo (Clifford Samuel) and Bones (Daniel Ward), are trapped in a minstrel show and planning their escape. Across three segments (past, present and future), we follow their scheme to make money and change the world, rising “from quarters to dollars, from dollars to dreams”.

Samuel and Ward are outstanding talents, delivering compelling performances which demand great skill. From Vaudeville to rap, comedy, horror and poignancy, they do it all with panache. From the off, they are hilariously funny and charismatic, as they capture the ridiculous characteristics of the minstrelised men. This is not real Blackness: it’s Black men playing White men playing Black men in a clichéd, cartoon depiction, as defined by colonisers.

Costumes and set design by Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and ULTZ are telling, with the stage’s wings visible behind a badly painted backdrop, cardboard sun and imitation trees. This conveys artifice and theatricality as the Black men relate how it’s hard to be real when you’re trapped performing a show for others. Theirs is a story of control through capitalism, with Bones performing whatever lies the White man wants to see for money. And the audience is left watching in squirming awkwardness as the N-word is liberally dispensed and stereotypes drawn. All Tambo wants to do it nap. He’s tired of it all.

There’s no lecturing here about race and the White gaze: it’s more an immersive understanding. At points, it’s clear that the audience is undergoing a simulation of the Black experience. We’re in half light, constantly visible, and forced to perform by clapping or responding to the demands of the actors who invade our space and engage us. There are moments of uncomfortable uncertainty where we’re unsure what responses are expected; which leaves us questioning our role in all this. Even the playwright writing this fiction is challenged. He’s literally a puppet, torn apart and found to have cash at his heart. Whose story is being told exactly, and how truthful is it?

In the second section time has passed and the pair are now famous hip hop artists. They have wealth, so they have the white man’s tool. But the world’s no better and they’re still performing as concepts of Black. Ciarán Cunningham’s lighting design excels in this section, complementing the superb rapping, with its intelligent, incisive lyrics, and transporting us to an exciting live gig that’s visceral, immediate theatre.

By section three they’ve reached a futuristic dystopia, where Tambo has instigated a White genocide using robots (played gloriously by Jaron Lammens and Dru Cripps). Again, reality is cleverly challenged as we see artificial White men playing Black men: human but not living. It’s all illusory. But this is a story traced with violence against people who are different, and that remains influential even after all the Whites have gone.

We’re finally snapped back to a reality where Bones can no longer act, losing his American drawl and leaving the audience to contemplate how institutional racism has brought us to this: perhaps no longer seeing race in isolation as a concept, but viewing humanity in its actuality. It’s a hugely powerful ending that will linger long after you leave the theatre.

Written by: Dave Harris
Directed by: Matthew Xia
Set & Costume Design by: Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and ULTZ
Lighting Design by: Ciarán Cunningham
Hip-Hop Beats by: Excalibah*
Sound Design & Additional Composition by: Richard Hammarton
Movement Direction by: Kloé Dean
Video Design by: Gino Ricardo Green
Fight Direction by: Sam Lyon-Behan
Smith Sound Operated by: Max Deane

*WAR produced by Roly Botha and Excalibah and Dollas to Dreams produced by Excalibah and Roly Botha

Tambo & Bones runs at Stratford East until Saturday 10 May.