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Typical: Soho Theatre On Demand | Review
February 25, 2021 Last updated:
March 14, 2021
A black man is preparing to head out to paint the town red (this was in 1998, before anyone responds with questions about the legality of leaving one’s house to socialise). As is the case with too many black people’s stories, this is only going to end one way: badly. But this is not, despite the show’s title, a typical case of verbal abuse and a bit of argy-bargy in some nightclub. Some people even think that one hasn’t really lived unless one has been barred from at least one pub in one’s lifetime.
Last modified on Thu 25 Feb 2021 06.21 EST
Christopher Alderâs last moments, in April 1998, were unforgivably brutal. Injured in a fight at a nightclub, he took his final breath in police custody. It was an abject death: an unlawful killing that, for his campaigners, represented another instance of a black British man dying in a senseless way.
Yet what is marked about Ryan Calais Cameronâs astounding play, written in rap-like rhyming verse and tracing the minutiae of its unnamed characterâs final day, is that it bursts with life, zest, humour and hedonism even as it hurtles towards tragedy.
First staged as a solo show in 2019 and now created by Nouveau Riche and Soho theatre for a screen version, it becomes a perfect, if eviscerating, nugget of dramatic performance in its new medium; theatrical in setting but also sharply focused and dreadful in its filmic intimacy. When the violence comes, the camera seems to throw the punches. In a claustrophobic closeup, it tight