Written by US spoken word poet and playwright Dave Harris’, Tambo & Bones is a blistering, darkly comic, satire that fuses hip-hop and theatre to explore the intersection between race, capitalism and performance. The play is startlingly relevant within the context of the current news agenda.
The production is directed by Matthew Xia aka DJ Excalibah. Matthew was the first DJ to join BBC 1Xtra in 2001 after being recruited from his award-winning radio show on Juice FM and known for promoting UK rappers. He is also a multi-award-winning theatre director and the Artistic Director of Actors Touring Company.
We join Matthew in the rehearsal room ahead of the first ever UK tour of Tambo & Bones as he shares his thoughts on the themes of the play and why it feels more timely than ever.
In your own words, what is Tambo & Bones about?
What it’s about and what happens – are two different things. I’ll try to go over those without giving any spoilers away.
The first thing it’s about is the commodification of Black performance. It does that in three acts. The first act is a minstrel show but they are not blacked up, they aren’t in black face make-up, they are Black performers – clowns – and they have found themselves trapped in a minstrel show. They want to escape that because it’s fake, it’s full of stereotypes and clichés. They break out of this construct, and in the second act, they become global hip-hop megastars.
The third act is an afro-futuristic lecture and celebration. In a speech that Tambo gives in the third act, he says ‘How can anyone know true freedom when they are always being watched’.
That’s what I think the play is about – at its heart. How can Black people truly feel free under constant observation, when their behaviour, mannerisms, their gestures, the way they sit, walk, talk, breathe, is constantly being assessed, judged, critiqued and prohibited? More recently I’ve come to realise that this play is also very much about division, facism and racial violence.
As the director, what are the complexities of bringing Tambo & Bones back for a UK tour – bringing original audiences back and still keeping it interesting?
One thing I’ve learned about this show is that it really does benefit from a second watch, or even a third watch in some cases. Once people know how it ends, they are keen to go back to the start and watch that journey reveal itself.
But if you see it for the very first time, you’ve just got to strap in, go on the ride, get off at the end and ask ‘what does that mean?’.
Tambo & Bones is a play that doesn’t function without the audience because at its heart, it’s about Black performance and those who are watching that performance, and what transactionally happens between the audience and the performers.
Tell us more about the importance of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ in Tambo & Bones, meaning directly addressing the audience.
The audience interaction is fascinating to watch, to see how people react and what people do at the end of the play… I don’t really like talking about the end of the play because that would be a bit of a spoiler. But at the end, we encourage audiences to stay in the auditorium for 15 minutes, just to reflect on what has happened before them. Again, that offers a liveness, it offers a unique experience based on who is in the auditorium.
What it does at the end is so powerful, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in a theatre – the closure that one expects at the end of the play, doesn’t happen. You are denied it as an audience. What do you do with that? Where do you take that energy that is normally released? I think it is such a bold ending from the playwright, Dave Harris. It means that the really complex conversations about the play have to happen in the bar, after the show. Or on the way home. Or in the auditorium in that 15 minute window we’ve created for people to reflect, hold each other, bond, think, laugh, laugh again, and possibly cry.
It’s quite a complex play –did you have any apprehension about working on Tambo & Bones?
I was a hip-hop DJ for 15 years. Tambo & Bones sits at the epicentre of a bunch of interests for me – the Transatlantic Slave Trade, my own family’s Jamaican history, and coming from West Africa – historically.
I’ve always been interested in emancipation, the post-emancipation Jim Crow laws, my love of hip hop, my love of complex politics, and I thought, this play, ticks all of these boxes for me.
The thing that has got the most backlash isn’t what is revealed in act three. It’s the prolific use of the ‘N-word’. However, if you listen to a lot of hip-hop artists, that word is present and it’s used in exactly the same way it’s used in Tambo & Bones – often to mean people, brother, or friend. It’s kind of a catch all term. It’s not a word I use myself when talking with people or about people. However, I can’t say that I haven’t got it in about 6000 references on my record shelves.
On that note, with all that is happening in the world, the timing of Tambo & Bones seems perfect when we consider Kendrick Lamar’s Superbowl performance and its impact on the cultural landscape. Would you agree?
I couldn’t agree more because when I saw the Super Bowl performance, I said, this is Tambo & Bones – everything it’s doing politically and musically, is completely in sync with where we are.
We’ve always referenced Kendrick Lamar in our research for this play. In the second act, Tambo performs a song called War, and it’s all in there; the relationship between the so-called American dream and Black America, stretching back to that painful history that we all know so much about. I thought Kendrick shared lots of the sentiment that Tambo & Bones offers with what he created in that performance.
Apart from a new dance move, what would you like audiences to take away from watching Tambo & Bones?
It’s a great night out. You’ve got humour, music, politics, playfulness, audience interaction, singalongs, dance-alongs and call and response. In that 1 hour and 25 minutes, you experience a rip-roaring, rollercoaster of a ride. It’s full of surprises, twists and turns.
It’s gloriously complex in a way that never feels complex until you start thinking about it at the culmination of the play. As with all art, what Tambo & Bones really presents – through its satirical form – is a mirror that I really hope offers an exhilarating, provocative and transformative night at the theatre.
Tambo & Bones tour dates:
- Royal & Derngate, Northampton(7 – 15 March 2025)
- Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse (26 – 29 March 2025)
- HOME Manchester (1 – 5 April 2025)
- Belgrade Theatre(9 – 12 April 2025)
- Stratford East(29 April – 11 May 2025)
- Leeds Playhouse (14 – 24 May 2025)
Related links:
- Actors Touring Company announce national tour of Tambo & Bones in 2025
- Rhashan Stone and Daniel Ward – Tambo & Bones interview
- 2023 review – Tambo & Bones
