Chris Eldon Lee reviews “The Legend of Mike Smith, which opens Birmingham Rep’s new studio space and plays until Saturday 28th September 2013.
After two years of trumpet blowing, Birmingham Repertory Theatre turned to a saxophonist to launch their new flexi-space, LED-illuminated studio theatre last night – and what an amazing night it was.
Soweto Kinch is not only a masterful, world-class instrumentalist, he’s a dynamic, driving hip hop poet with an Oxford degree in Modern History and a great grasp of allegorical theatre. To help him create ‘The Legend of Mike Smith’, he’s pulled around himself some absolutely startling performing talent and acquired the services of Jonzi D, the only hip hop choreographer to receive an MBE in the New Year’s Honour’s List.
Cards on the table; I’m a wrinkly from the white plains of Shropshire. So less than 10 per cent of my cultural spectrum overlaps with 10 per cent of his. But I was blown away all evening.
The set up is that young aspiring ‘MC’ (I think that’s the correct terminology) has been offered the recording deal of a lifetime – but only if he can deliver a ‘track’ that surpasses his arch-rival Buzzy Sparks by teatime. Our hero, Mike Smith, starts out with good intentions, only for the seven deadly sins to get in his way – eight if you include the temptation of ‘weed’.
The show takes on the character of an 80-minute, angrily funny, anxiety dream in which Smith embarks upon a desperate quest to find the holy grail of the golden microphone. With bass and drums accompaniment, it’s played out against a white muslin screen on which Nat Jones’ comic strip sword and sorcery creations are projected. Performers Ricardo Da Silva, Tyrone Isaas-Stuart and Soweto himself play three aspects of Smith’s psyche, and they’re certainly not shy of sending up their own genre with clichéd street-cred gear and pastiche, choreographed limps.
The dance is remarkable. In one amazing sequence (which struck me as almost impossible to perform live) Tyrone jags around the square stage as frantically as a kung fu fighter, his angular movements so rapid they defeat the eye.
The acting is sublimely subtle. Ricardo’s decline from fitness freak to dope head is a study of smiles – how different is the grin of an achiever, to that of someone wallowing in sin.
The jazz is utterly inventive – with Kinch and Tyrone duelling their saxophones and referencing the classics to musically represent the young hero’s downward spiral through Lust, Gluttony Wrath and the rest.
And the poetry is devastatingly clever. Okay, at times I felt it was so rapid and intense it was beating me over the head – but, like a pop-eyed Lenny Henry on speed – Kinch hammered out the humour with inventive innuendo and ridiculous rhymes. Duvet/Tuesday. Crazy/Ukelele. Les Dennis/Ben Nevis/Sex Menace. He turned classic shop assistant comments into sexual come-ons and summed up the curse of capitalism in just two adroit lines. Privatise the gains/socialise the losses. We all joined in with that one.
It was racy, slick, lively and quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen before (I must get out more) and it fanfares the new Rep Studio as a Jack-in-a Box of wonders.
Visit www.birmingham-rep.co.uk for information about Birmingham Rep.
Photo: Soweto Kinch (musician / performer) & Ricardo Da Silva (performer)
Photo credit: Graeme Braidwood