Review: Dreamscape, Arcola Theatre

Early on in Dreamscape our heroine, Myeisha (Kim Blanché Adonis), warns us not to expect a ‘ho ho ho’ kind of show. As she starts to tell her story, the sense of foreboding is strong: a late night, a broken-down car, a young Black woman, a police call-out… We read the news, we know how this goes. And yet Rickerby Hinds’ hip-hop theatre play, based on a real event, still manages to deliver shock, after shock, after shock, right to the end. 

Myeisha is 19. She raps, she rhymes, she dances, plays softball, has boobs at last, and struggles to choose between Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes. We learn all this, and more, through vignettes from her life that she relates using movement, music and spoken word. Each recollection is a sort of dream, or perhaps a snapshot from life ‘flashing before her eyes’, and each one is prompted by a grim detail from her autopsy report. 

Alongside reflections on her own life, Myeisha has plenty to say about Black culture, from the problem of Black people and cars, to Black women and their untouchable hair, to the erasure of Black faces in favour of Black bootys. For this viewer it was instructive, for others it prompted knowing laughs. 

The stage is bare other than two chairs, back-to-back, with Myeisha in the front seat. Behind her is Kgwadi Tshwarelo Selolo who plays the police call handler, the police officer and the coroner, as well as providing a beat box accompaniment at intervals in the story. Where Myeisha is a sunny figure, full of youthful optimism and always ready to dance or follow a rhyme where it leads, Tshwarelo Selolo brings the jeopardy. He moves slowly, with purpose, and speaks with the weight of a sinister authority. In the early stages of the story his very thick accent makes it hard to follow some of what’s going on, but then again, confusion and incomprehension are the inevitable responses to Myeisha’s death. 

Like a dream, Dreamscape is full of repetition: of words, movements, sounds, songs, phrases. There’s repetition as Myeisha tries to make sense of what’s happening to her, as the call handler tries to understand the situation on the other end of the line, as the police officer tries to explain as his actions and finally, as the play reaches its circular conclusion, there’s repetition of a dance that finally makes sense to the audience. 

The story is set in 1998, with the Y2K bug looming large. It’s a different era, and Hinds puts a few knowing allusions into Myeisha’s mouth that younger audiences may not understand. But the central story – of state violence and state-sanctioned violence against Black people – sadly hasn’t aged at all.   

Written by Rickerby Hinds
Directed by Rickery Hinds and Mxolisi Masilela

Dreamscape plays at Arcola Theatre until Saturday 8 August.