Tambo & Bones is a stirring piece of work by American poet and playwright Dave Harris which wraps its confrontation in exquisite humour and layers of metatheatricality. Matthew Xia directs this, its UK première, with his usual astute eye and ear, mastering the show’s beats of comedy, pathos, musicality and unblinking challenge.
The show begins in a cartoonishly flat and bright outdoor setting. The wordless opening sees our protagonists, Tambo (Clifford Samuel) and Bones (Daniel Ward), in a field, sweltering under an unforgiving sun. They, too, appear cartoonish—a pair of 1930s tramp-like figures, Tambo in top hat and dishevelled tails, Bones in a brown three-piece suit and bowler hat.
These personas interact at first in the gestures and sound effects of an early Looney Tunes or Laurel and Hardy short, scratching their heads expressively before coming up with a moment of inspiration, or taking a run-up to exit the stage and put into play their next grand scheme. But these clowns evolve quickly: language arrives, a witty blend of heightened expression and modern idiom, complete with cuss words. Spotting the (obviously fake) tree that Tambo has placed on a chair in search of shade, Ward expresses Bones’s incredulity with a pitch-perfect reading of the line “… the f—k?!”
The costumes—and the characters’ stasis—evoke Beckett, but also perhaps a first hint of more confronting caricatures. Bones holds his hat out, begging for ‘quarters’ from the audience. He’ll do anything to get them: lie, perform, even mutilate himself. And what, the play asks, is the difference between those three acts?
Tambo, on the other hand, just wants a bit of rest—but when he can’t get that, Bones’s thirst for money infects him. Tambo’s suggestion is to perform a treatise on race in America—that’s what these people watching want from them.
The themes of the play are established lightly and wittily, and they pack all the more of a punch for it. These characters’ struggle is one of authenticity; a quest to figure out what it means to be ‘real’. The second act of the play develops this theme through music, as Tambo and Bones are now globally successful rap megastars.
Here, Samuel and Ward show impressive verbal dexterity, delivering Harris’s complex but clear rhymes with real flair. The music nods to history with gospel samples (“Wade in the Water”) and an array of beats riffing on classic rap and hip hop, assembled by Xia himself under his pseudonym DJ Excalibah.
Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and ULTZ’s set and costumes are transformed along with the form of the play, and combine with Ciarán Cunningham’s lighting design to signify the brashness of a hip hop duo in their pomp. “Nickels to dollars, dollars to dreams” they go—but what happens next? The last beat before the interval is one of escalating race tensions and essentially all-out war.
The final third of Harris’s play effects yet another shifting of the frame, pulling back again to go yet-more-meta. Samuel and Ward speak directly to the audience, and here we’re also playing a role. And we get to see the rest of the cast of four, though it’s spoiling things to say too much about the roles played by the audience or by Jaron Lammens and Dru Cripps. These two are deeply impressive, though, and play a key part in the final reckoning of the piece.
But it’s Samuel and Ward’s show, and they’re a phenomenal double act, whether contorting themselves cartoonishly, spitting speedy bars or speaking directly to us. They’re charming, fleet of foot and funny, and they strike just the right note throughout.
The production proved controversial in its early days when Theatre Royal Stratford East suggested that one performance be billed as a “Black Out” showing, for an all-black-identifying audience. It’s a shame if this controversy gets in the way of what the play itself does. In itself, it challenges the assumed whiteness of theatre audiences; questions the responsibility of black performers to entertain and amuse, often through depictions of pain and hardship; problematises questions of authenticity and identity politics and much more, all while smiling and joking around.
Tambo & Bones asks what if the boasts, braggadocio and bullets of one kind of hip hop fuse with the racial justice of another—and get enacted in real life. Again without spoiling the ending, it's not for nothing that the text invokes minstrel shows early on. Harris finds sharp, deviously clever ways of layering ideas, subverting them, pulling back the frame and delivering a killer punch.