The performance has already begun when the audience comes into the theatre. Memorial candles flicker among sad bunches of flowers at the front of the stage. Between these and a high wall of blackened London brick, a man and three women are moving. They move in slow and emotional sequences, repeated again and again: pained reaching gestures, tight dances of defiance, numb shuffles, bewildered stumbling. Behind them in the wall, the giant outline of a smooth male head in shocking signal red forms a hole.
They come together, spitting out in unison the halting phrase they heard from the lips of a police officer:
“There…was…a…bit…of…a…scuffle…and…I’m…sorry…to…say…he…passed…away…”
The weasel inadequacy of these words is apparent even before the story of Brian has been shared. They are not only inadequate, they are misleading in the extreme. Who is Brian? Brian is the elder son of a woman of Nigerian origin living in London. His sudden death occurs while he is in police custody for no real reason.
It rips apart his mother’s life and the lives of a sister, a younger brother, a fiancée. The fact that none of these characters is given a name brings home how lost even their identities as people becomes in the wake of tragedy and injustice.
Brian’s death leaves a hole in their world more raw than the head hole in that wall. Within the family he was the peacemaker and the glue. The wall swings open onto savage white mortuary tiles. Brian’s loved ones formally identify his cold corpse. What is that huge swelling on his face? The questions mount up, the need for truth and justice becomes all consuming. Until they get it they cannot lay Brian’s body to rest. Until they get it none of them can even properly grieve.
This is urgent and angry theatre. It is not fiction. Black men in particular are dying in British police stations in highly disproportionate numbers. Often, as in Brian’s case, they should not even be in those buildings because no crime has been committed. At least not by them. The wider world is asleep to this growing trend. Custody is a wake up call.
The writing and production are piercing. Clever, versatile set designs lend a terrible clinical air to everything, even to people’s homes because the effects of an outrage like this are so invasive. Harsh white lighting is given moodier undertones by flashes of emergency red and blue or by a glowering sodium ochre. The music by SEKRIT maintains a threatening mood. Director GBEMISOLA IKUMELO has got this.
The cast are wonderful. Nobody is credited as playing Brian but every one of them does, in different contexts and in different ways. Together they perform his dreadful absence.
As his mum with her defiantly held handbag MONA OTARU excels at broken incomprehension. She scolds a plastic rosary because her son’s murder is too much for her Christian faith, and the moment is lit. She tries to replace Catholicism with the Òrìṣà religion of her childhood but peace and comfort will not come. Otaru’s voice stiffens up into dispassionate RP to deliver a particularly bitter police statement at a press conference. Later on after further misfortune she wrings the darkest comedy out of Mother’s wordless responses to her surviving children’s cussing.
EWA DINA plays with suppressed rage the sister galvanised into relentless campaigning by her loss. Whenever she has to stop for any length of time, she sags into something numb. Brian’s death ages her and not only in appearance. This middle child becomes the eldest against her will. It is Dina who acts out the terrible indignities of Brian’s arrest: stripped down to underwear, brutalised, mocked and restrained. Brian’s handcuffs are represented on her by a bright white chain shackling her wrists. Her horror, our horror is indescribable.
URBAN WOLF is excellent as the brother left behind. His resentments become fixated on the now eternally perfect Brian and they send him down a troubling path. We spend a lot of Custody afraid for his safety and sanity. Together with ROCHELLE JAMES as Brian’s fiancée he explores a consequence of these murders that is rarely acknowledged or spoken about. James is extraordinary. There is one moment when, newly alone in the flat she shared with Brian, she reads out the soulless and inappropriate contents of a piece of junk mail from a bank. Trite and meaningless words invested with such agony and ache.
Verdicts and outcomes are best left undescribed in reviews. This is a piece of work expertly structured to draw the audience into feelings and experiences that are deep and too frequently hidden. It exposes and it questions with great precision. The nightmarish and imaginative presentation never eclipse the appropriate fury at Custody‘s core. It desperately needs to be seen.
Created by: Urban Wolf
Written by: Thomas Wainwright
Directed by: Gbemisola Ikumelo
Cast:
Ewa Dina (Sister)
Rochelle James (Lover)
Mona Otaru (Mother)
Urban Wolf (Brother)
Theatre Va-va-voom! 