Theatre Peckham’s Young, Gifted and Black season celebrating young Black artists opens explosively, with acerbic writing and feverish performance from Ty’rone Haughton.Rating
Unmissable!
Theatre Peckham is a lively venue with a great welcome, and it delivers one rich performance after another. Finley-Rose Townsend (Producer and Director) champions Spoken Word as a legitimate theatrical form and playwright Ty’rone Haughton maintains this genre. This is where this venue excels, as it uses a different lens to view the familiar and to challenge our expectations.
Haughton was an early starter in their Young, Gifted and Black (YGB) season which celebrates young black artists. His new Spoken Word play Made You Look is an absolutely absorbing experience. With explosive moments of rage, anger, humour, tenderness, and song, he reveals the inward conflict of a Black British male – the loss of agency, as well as chronicling external historic social pressures. The writing here is packed with stunning imagery and metaphor; the bonsai tree; the constant physical pull of the colonial master; the knee to the neck; being boxed and coffined by preconceived ideas while Caribbean seas swirl with blood – and still the man must push on, settle and integrate.
This is a performance that is visceral with its accusations and tender in its inquisitiveness about how we got to this situation. How touching when, in turmoil, Haughton asks Alexa to pray for him as he emotionally stumbles, considering what it means to be both Jamaican and a Black man in an increasingly divisive Britain. This duopoly is the conundrum that he wrestles with; where do our allegiances lie, and how is our heritage to be valued and used to benefit the individual? Importantly the work questions who or what is restraining the Black male individual from fully realising his potential?
Of course, this powerful rendition of the spoken word is a personal testament of a single young Black male, but it is relevant to us all ‘birthed of the same earth’, with our mixed Celtic heritages or Asian households, or our challenging faiths or secular ways. We all have some tricky navigation of contemporary British society that is complex and challenging – to whom are we loyal? Do you support the local team, or the place of worship, or forefathers? ‘Quick to bruise, quick to smooth’.
Haughton offers ranging verse; rhythms of blues, banter of rap, style of hip hop, are all in this escaping voice that draws us into the turmoil that is the Black bloom. The cubed set, designed by Gemma Caseley-Kirk, is neatly supportive of the Spoken Word delivery and style without suffocating the personal voice. It adds nuance to moments; but by his own admission Haughton is not in a play, not an actor, but an individual voicing a personal journey. He is breaking out from the confines of theatre to reach out to us, to share, and for us to feel together the anguish of the man who now walks ‘with a broken crown’, emasculated from generational trauma and reminding us “I know boys”. Haughton writes vividly, articulating complex ideas about race, identity and manhood and men should listen and weep.
Written by Ty’rone Haughton
Produced and Directed by Finley-Rose Townsend
Movement Director: Corey Campbell
Sound Design by Chawe Chewesday
Design by Gemma Caseley-Kirk
Made You Look has completed its current run.
