THE WINDRUSH WARRIORS
Moses’ crowded bedsit is where the new ones turn up off the boat train, wanting to know how to do London; he can tell them names like Clapham -“not Clap-farm!” and Notting Hill, and make it clear that it is not paved with gold, “you had better mind yourself! Or this London City will eat you alive, swallow you up whole”. It’s a weary job, putting them right, especially when like “Galahad” they’re so clueless they didn’t even know to bring duty-free cigarettes and rum with them, and have no luggage – “no sense to load myself with a lot of things, when I start work I will buy things”. The more experienced men shake their heads: “City” is a ticket hustler, Lewis hating his menial jobs and darkly suspicious of his wife, who is settling rather better.
Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel about his Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants to London is a modern classic: easy to see why Roy Williams, clear-eyed chronicler of a later generation, wanted to make a play of it. But the book is a plotless collection of individual stories – sharp portraits, honest chronicles of struggle and rejection and confusion – and drama needs a plot, a rising tension to anchor it. Ebenezer Bambgoye’s direction does its best to make it theatrical, offering surreal, beautifully choreographed moments expressive of the men’s experience, and brief yearning musical flashbacks to Moses’ decision back in Trinidad to leave his pregnant girlfriend. But the most an audience gets – and to be fair, it is not nothing – is immersion in their world: empathy. On a side wall there are three props pinned – a gun, a knife, a hipflask, and any tension comes from wondering which of them will be driven to which by bafflement, homesickness, the crush of failure to find work or the temptation of felony? All three are picked up one point; all three do go back.
Gamba Cole is thoughtfully, gently likeable as Moses, Gilbert Kyem Jnr gives us “City” as a towering but likeable fool, Romario Simpson’S Galahad, the newcomer , suffers the most agonizing self hatred after a fight, staring furiously at his arms, raging against his body. “Why the hell coldnt we be blue, or red, or gree, if we can’t be wrhite? Why did we have to be black? We have done nothing to upset these people..So black and innocent and yet its causing nothing but misery, this black! I hate it!”. He wants to go home.
Moments like that are full of life and reality: what stands out strongly is how much it was a world of men. The women are more scarce, but here shown as doing rather better. Lewis’ wife Agnes (an impressive Shannon Hayes) is carefully learning to sound more English with tongue=twisters, recruiting Carol Moses as “Tanty`”, her mother-in-law, to the effort. Tanty is a delight, explaining to a reporter that she dissuades others in Trinidad for coming to England “Over there it so cold, only white people do live there and demn rude. No offence”. But she tells her son “This is your country now, if something dont fit, make changes!” But after a wonderful scene upbraiding a greengrocer for trying to cheat her with old vegetables, the wife Agnes returns to report with pride that he ended up smiling at her, and Lewis immediately falls into Othello-level rage – “What reason you give him to smile?”.
Indeed the most overwhelming effect of the play is to emphasise a cramped maleness – not unfamiliar in some of our new wave of immigrants today – which brings with it a fiery anger, a sex-starved itch of desire, aggression and contempt, and anequally male weight of shame at failure and poverty. Lewis, knowing he is disintegrating, says “Its like I am a different person here!!” Moses is jacked off at a prosperous Polish restaurateur of an earlier wave of immigrants – “We are British subjects , he the foreigner!”. His response, though, is a resigned withdrawal from his situation,alleviated by his weary care of the newcomers.
So great moments. But perhaps to compensate for the exigous plot , and the too-rare use of Sevon’s lyrical passages, the effect is almost ceaselessly one-note shouty. Culturally appropriate perhaps (I lived in 1971 Notting Hill long before it was posh, and the male-voice decibel level was high), but tiring over 105-minutes. It’s a tribute tohistory, and to a group of pioneering immigrants, vital to remember and love. But as drama it is not the next Roy Williams triumph we were hoping for.
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 6 April
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