Intensity can dissolve distance. Hopes were always high for Hymn, Lolita Chakrabarti’s new play, not least because it starred Adrian Lester and Danny Sapani. Then Covid snatched it from the stage and its chances seemed sadly diminished. Could a drama about intimacy and trust be convincing when actors have to stand two metres apart? Blanche McIntyre’s tremendous livestreamed production proves that it can.
It is the layering – of sound, sight, words, dance, gesture – that gives this two-hander its depth charge. Chakrabarti wanted to explore something she had seen among friends and extended family, but never on stage: a love between men which was neither physical nor romantic, but subtle, complicated, often uncertain. Her plot – which draws on a racist incident involving Lester, to whom she is married – deserves to keep its secrets, but nothing is ruined by saying they hinge on a meeting between two middle-aged men and involve the loyalties and betrayals of brothers, fathers and sons.
Lester and Sapani are first-rate and perfectly balanced. At first, Lester is nonchalant and on the brink of condescension, while Sapani is bunched and jittery; gradually the sense of power between them shifts; always – it is one of the play’s most unusual features – they are intricately attentive to each other. Yet Hymn is theatrically polyglot: words are only one of its languages. As the punning title suggests, music is essential here. Long before it is used as a metaphor – these men are “two black notes of the same value” – it is heard as a pulse, felt as a quick route to the past. Lester and Sapani sing: soul and hip-hop classics – Papa Was a Rolling Stone, Lean on Me, Rapper’s Delight – run through the action, supplying not only undercurrent but information.
Seeking to recover time that might have been shared, they dance to the favourite tracks of their youth – gracefully, expressively. They work out together, using core exercises as an occasion for confession: the significance of “core” is merely floated; nothing is overemphasised. For particular inward moments, Prema Mehta’s lighting expertly carves out small alcoves of light.
The mighty Miriam Buether is responsible not only for set design but for costumes so eloquent they could chart the progress of the story by themselves. Here is early difference – Sapani bustling in leather jacket and woolly hat, Lester relaxed in a sober suit. Here is a merging of selves as the two try on each other’s uniform, with Lester in workout gear. Here is a polished but doomed business venture in the shape of a glorious gold suit with blue trim. Even a dry cleaner’s rack becomes eloquent and theatrical: as if a dying man might see his life flash before him, not as a series of events but as the clothes he wore to greet them.
In 1998 Christopher Alder bled to death on the floor of a police station in Hull. He was 37 and had been on a night out. The title of Ryan Calais Cameron’s one-man play clenches on the idea that though his dying was preventable, the events leading up to it were “typical”, based on everyday assumptions about how a black man behaves. Taken to hospital after an assault outside a nightclub, Alder’s clamour was considered disruptive; questioned by police, his confusion was ascribed not to a head injury but to drink or amphetamine. Dragged across the floor of the police station, his trousers around his ankles, the gurgles of blood from his mouth were dismissed as being put on.
Typical is Cameron’s imagining of Alder’s last day. He wrote the first draft in one night, after he had been subjected to a racist episode: it plays as if hot off the page. “A cocoa pop in a bowl of milk”, Richard Blackwood delivers the monologue fuelled not simply by fury but by a frantic hope that this horror may not really happen. He brims over with words but does not have “a way” with them: his explosive speeches are locked into themselves with excited phrases and internal rhymes. Anastasia Osei-Kuffour’s production, first seen at Edinburgh in 2019, and filmed by her at Soho theatre, is full of power: it might be even more shocking on stage, where even death is “live”.
Star ratings (out of five)
Hymn ★★★★★
Typical ★★★★
• A recording of Hymn is available on demand from 3-6 March. Click here for tickets
• Typical is online at sohotheatreondemand.com