We’ve all heard of urban myths or legends, but when I read the premise of Tife Kusoro’s play G, the story of a presence named Baitface who steals the identity of black boys, should they pass faces uncovered under a pair of trainers suspended from a telephone wire. Well, I was not quite sure what I was in for.
We are introduced to friends Kai (Selorm Adonu) and Joy (Kadiesha Belgrave) first, who are cautiously tripping on weed. I say cautiously because Kai is clearly tense about what happens next, his shiny eyed worry feels total authentic. His friend treats him with an almost familial tenderness as the effects roll through his body, reassuring him, promising to protect him if need be. Their resulting interaction is so funny to watch. The connectedness between these two actors feels natural. Not like they are acting at all, and this impression of longtime kinship only deepens when their trio is completed by Khaleem, (Ebenezer Gyau) who was elsewhere at the start. Khaleem is half-brother to Kai, slightly more serious persona than his friends. These early scenes are central to the story as it is this night that the whereabouts of these three young people are laid out, setting the scene for what happens later.
In these conversations between friends, I felt like the additional one as they jostled and slowly unwrapped the mythology of Baitface, playfully but with increasing discomfort. The play moves quite fast as we come to know our characters and the various encounters and experiences they have, the very origin of which they increasingly come to question as time goes on. Such is the slippery nature of memory in the play but specifically of “the night in question” which hangs over everything. We watch them ponder how to move around the mythology, starting out as sceptics but soon enough paying their respects to the glowing trainers above their heads as legend demands, for the most part and as the seeds of superstition are sewn things soon start to fester.
It is a bit of a twisty thing this narrative at times. Sometimes I felt a bit lost, but it did not affect my enjoyment at all because the performances were so captivating, so humorous, and at points so tender. It is testament to the writing that you buy into Joy, Khaleem and Kai, and I wondered afterward if this sense of convolution was entirely on purpose.
The set design is something else. Light and colour are used boldly. How thoughtfully blackouts, almost intrusive bold video of news footage beamed across the stage here and there, all add layers to the story. The theatre is intimate, and thus this all adds up to a viewing experience which is immersive and the occasionally interactions with the audience add to this. There is a sequence that beautifully conveys the feeling of being in a lucid dream. If you have not had one before imagine being in a dream and knowing you are dreaming, even as you are moving and talking and things are happening to you, and yet you have some power to influence your surroundings though it is fraught. You are trapped, none the less. Imagine this on stage, with choreographed movement, Kai and Joy jostling, in slow motion, Kahleem, paying his respects to the sneakers, in a single movement repeated over and over. The jostling is not strictly physical, there is a working through here I appreciate more now having read the script.
There’s more to an uncomfortable scene where Joy exits a Sainsbury’s, shopping in hand only to keep triggering the alarms, but this, and other things the boy’s experience throughout made me think about the societal view of black boys; as suspicious, as something to be feared, questioned, this was expressed throughout but without leaning on stereotype, really illuminating the vulnerability of each of the characters at each of these moments. Viewing this also through the lens of gender, Joy was assigned female at birth but is referred to as he/him/ throughout, brings an element to explore that is rarely seen in stories centring stories of Black youth.
At the centre for me was a play about friendship and its pressure points, the rendering of grief, the tensions between vulnerability, fear (collective and individual) and the repression and expression of anger. The ways in which this conflated time and again with masculinity, with childhood, and for black boys, never in a good way. I still felt a little bit of doubt about the happenings. Who was where and when. Like Baitface had nothing to do with anything, memory is hazy, everyone is an unreliable narrator, and truth is up for question. Kusoro plays effectively with us here.
Props must be given to Dani Harris-Walters’ portrayal of Baitface. He is omnipresent, watching the movements of the trio, stalking, hunched over, in his socks, making barely any sound save for the occasional swish of his garments as he moves with slow deliberate movements around the stage. He feels not only the embodiment of the urban legend brought to life, but commentator too, he may not say much but he makes judgements, he listens, he is observant.
I enjoyed this play immensely. A meditation on the power of legend, on the generational wounds from which they stem, of fear, of friendship, of power lost and reclaimed, deep but not heavy. I look forward to seeing what Tife Kusoro manifests next.
Need to know: G plays at Royal Court Theatre until 21 Sep 2024 | See listing.
