This is all about how, when you are booked, busy and black in this industry, you are not blessed. This has the danger of ending up so self-regarding that it puts you off. The fact that it does not is down to the combination of the playful delivery of a script which allows for being off script and working the audience and our narrator and guide, Yolanda Mercy. This is more than a passion project, but is also a passionate explanation of why women of colour do not get the same opportunities as the rest of us. It is a painful experience in the telling but also a painful experience, and it should be, in the hearing for the rest of us.
The story, unfortunately, is a familiar one. Woman of colour gets a hit; in this case, it is a BAFTA-winning moment that catapults her into contention for new projects. There follow meetings and then a crisis that must be navigated. In this case, it is a project about a child who was murdered in a playground and a play that began as something which was important and authentic but, due to the need to “get bums on seats”, has turned into a platform for a “celebrity” and “influencer”. Both are far away from the truth that Mercy has at her heart, and throughout this piece, told with searing honesty, she speaks about how things made her feel and how things were patterned for her. That pattern appears in her home life as she ends up in a “situation”-ship with a married man—without ever knowing his relationship status.
There is a wonderful cameo form her Nigerian mother who haunts with the advice which we all ignore until we need to heed: don’t compromise yourself.
The twist, which sees her being confronted by her mother and her father indicating they think she needs therapy because Toby, that friend who never picks up when she calls and needs help, is someone who will never pick up. She then goes and visits his grave to help her healing. That does not, however, diminish the story till then but enhances it, because the effect of how Marcus treated her, how her ideas are before being abandoned, how she may be a perfect match to tell JJ’s story—not because she is a mother, not because she has experience in this kind of story but because she is black—is visceral.
Once the recovery happens, she finds her voice, and when there is mounting pressure over her play—which tells of a scholarship in a private school—being abandoned because of the resistance to decisions she never made—including the one making the principal character an influencer, not because she was a scholarship kid in a private school, not because she has experience of this kind of story but because she hits a demographic they struggle to attract—which is not black.
But the reason this works is because whoever these idiots were, they missed a storyteller with an eye for detail and ear for an audience. Mercy is sublime. She clearly has some people in the audience she knows, and the experiences she is relating are shared with them. She does it with such skill that the telling is enhanced and we are not excluded—imagine someone who has experienced exclusion and is determined not to repeat that process for others—that’s you now in the room. Mercy manages it with style and leaves me looking out for more from her pen after watching her slickly delivered script that captures an awesome array of opinion and delivers it with great skill.
This takes success and shows its many sides, which theatrically makes us aware of its pitfalls with a complex story simply told by one who knows—they were there.