Originally inspired by Ntozake Shange’s 1974 choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Ryan Calais Cameron (also directing this time, original director was Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu) wrote his emotionally poetic response to Tayvon Martin’s killing in 2012 and then put it (act one) in a drawer.
Life, having children, marinated his views and he finally wrote the second half of his play, which was picked up by David Byrne (now the new Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre) at the New Diorama in 2021. 2022, it was at the Royal Court, 2023 it made it to the Apollo in West End, and here it is back in the West End a year later with a new cast. It has life in it still.
For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy comes full of beans, the lighting (Rory Beaton) in kindergarten primary colours, the sound design and composition (Nicola T Chang) a mix of several genres, jazzy, mellow, hiphop and more. The place is jumping, as are the hyper boys—from too much energy, anxiety and emotion.
As well they might with choreography by Theophilus O Bailey, whom I’ve seen perform with Boy Blue in Blak, Whyte, Gray, assisted by Jade Hackett, formerly with ZooNation. The boys are rarely still, even when still, on Anna Reid’s simple two-tier set. Stairs are raced up, balcony bars humped. Young male randy sexuality, groin clutching and wishful thinking: rapping and krumping are much in evidence, but so are balletic solos under a spotlight.
The brilliant new cast, with skin tones, and perhaps personalities, reflected in their names—Onyx (Tobi King Bakare), Pitch (Shakeel Haakim), Jet (Fela Lufadeju), Sable (Albert Magashi), Obsidian (Mohammed Mansaray) and Midnight (Posi Morakinyo)—is warm, vulnerable, out to delight. Their rapport with the audience is great—it’s almost in call and response mode at a revivalist meeting.
They make eyes and passes in jovial style, playing up to type, but For Black Boys… is a choreopoem to lost lives, lost opportunities, frustrations, cultural demands and love. Only love can heal mental health. A community of the like-minded or troubled, here six men in group therapy, give each other that prop. The opening image, a pyramid of human bodies, defines that concept in the blink of an eye.
Skin, visible differences, still is an issue in multicultural London: being othered, pigeonholed, stopped and searched by police, what it means to be black. Traumatised from an early age, not just by strangers but by a father who dispenses discipline at the end of a fist, the self becomes confused. How does one stay a good boy when there are ‘bad’ boys out there?
And senseless knife crime on heightened trigger response, the moment suicide becomes homicide, one says... How black is black, what about the denigration within, the Oreo insult? One complains of the ‘N’ word amongst friends, don't ever call me that that either with an ‘a’ or an ‘er’, he says. Why do black boys speak Jamaican patois when many have African backgrounds, proud African backgrounds?
Macho men—a father who won’t seek medical help and dies prematurely—posturing when you’re scared, scarred and dying inside. And what about being black and gay when that is frowned on within the community... Incidentally, there’s a new book just out on that theme, Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain by Jason Okundaye. And there’s always James Baldwin, of course, for succour.
So many issues, yet they, we, are all children, which they are in the first scene, delightful and funny until you realise it’s play therapy, letting it all out. Pain, the stress of living up, or down, to stereotyping, is recognised vocally by the audience, fingers clicking at each proof.
Six ‘brothers’ support each other with love, but even love can be viewed as dodgy. Well, the audience loves them. A deafening standing ovation—For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy preaches love and it gets love in return.
“The themes explored in the play are timeless”, writer and director Ryan Calais Cameron acknowledges. Depressingly so, I think. And some themes cross ethnicity, gender, and age, I might add. It “has been developed over the course of the last decade with young Black men and mental health groups”. The good news is that “25% of all tickets available will be priced at £25 or under throughout its run”.