ajhlovestheatre

TAMBO & BONES 

by Dave Harris

directed by Matthew Xia

Theatre Royal Stratford East, London – until 10 May 2025

Leeds Playhouse, Leeds – 14 to 24 May 2025

running time: 2 hours including interval

https://www.atctheatre.com/production/tambo-bones-2025/

Plays that genuinely think outside the box and set your mind and pulse racing, leaving you questioning and exhilarated in a way that few mediums other than live theatre can manage, are comparatively rare…but here’s one. First seen in 2022 at NYC’s Playwrights Horizons and now enjoying (due to public demand) a second UK outing, Tambo & Bones is an astonishing, provocative piece of theatrical bravura that rips up the rule book on playmaking. 

Philadelphia born Dave Harris was a slam poet before turning his hand to writing plays and I suspect that’s what accounts for Tambo & Bones’s breathtaking, free-form structure and way with language. It’s genuinely not like anything else I’ve ever seen: a challenging, exciting, racially charged almost-duet that examines Black masculinity in the US (although American culture is so all-encompassing that this play is likely to resonate wherever it’s performed in the western world) and comes to some pretty bleak conclusions about the pathways of humanity. 

Matthew Xia’s pacy, shape-shifting production for Actors Touring Company, in conjunction with Stratford East and a quartet of the UK’s most prestigious regional houses, is alive to the nuances and ambiguities in the text. It’s bracing, confrontational, and oh so ambitious….for starters, the satirical piece covers five hundred years in less than two hours playing time. At its best it’s unforgettable, and at times it’s almost impenetrable, but certainly never boring.

It’s divided, not neatly, into three sections. The title characters (Clifford Samuel and Daniel Ward, both extraordinary) initially appear as figures in a minstrel show, complete with artificially bucolic setting and banjo soundtrack, and the unwelcome stereotypes inherent in that mercifully lost form of entertainment whereby Black people are portrayed as lazy, dishonest and sunny-natured to the point of idiocy. There’s a Beckettian pathos and absurdity to this shabbily attired, endearing but vaguely disquieting pair. Tambo just wants to nap in the sun, while Bones is scrounging for dimes to go visit his sick son, or at least that’s what he tells us at first. It’s very funny, and the physical discipline, comic skills and sheer energy of both actors is spellbinding. It’s also disturbing: what is the modern relevancy of these questionable tropes being resurrected, what’s with the confrontational racially insensitive language, and where is this worrying undertow of threat leading? This is electrifying stuff.

Harris proceeds in the next section to draw an uncomfortable but credible line from Black minstrels demeaning themselves for the entertainment of white people, to the rap artists that become wealthy global superstars on the back of their African American heritage. It’s still Tambo and Bones but now it’s a hundred years on and they are winning awards and playing massive stadiums. Samuel and Ward transform with breathtaking conviction from gifted comic players to legitimate hip-hop stars, complete with insouciant swagger and elaborate, intricate word runs. As with a lot of rap performed live and heavily amplified, it’s not possible to catch every word but Bones is still preoccupied with money though the dimes are now dollars (lots of dollars) while Bones is now fully awake and all about social injustice. 

For the final part, Tambo & Bones moves into a more challenging, surreal zone that also carries a feeling of alarming inevitability. Set four hundred years in the future, it’s more open to interpretation perhaps than the earlier sections but it’s hugely powerful. Tambo and Bones have now become activists in an apparently lawless America torn apart by racially motivated strife. It veers nearer to performance art as a pair of white robots are wheeled on in a giant neon-edged box (Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and ULTZ’s design and the lighting by Ciarán Cunningham are striking) and all hell breaks loose. It ends with an act of extreme violence and the lines “I know what I’ve done”….but what are the implications for humanity as a whole? Harris doesn’t give us any easy answers but if you don’t leave the theatre unsettled and full of questions, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.

Samuel and Ward are chameleonic and brilliant, switching from lovable to menacing, vulnerable to empowered, sympathisers to aggressors as required by the text. Their ability to go from charming to unnerving is quite something to experience, and collectively and individually they deliver acting (and rapping!) of the highest order. Terrific performances. Xia’s staging is slightly hampered by an unnecessary interval that interrupts the flow and tension but other than that, this is fierce, technically accomplished  theatre (Gino Ricardo Green’s video design is another triumph, as is the musical contribution of Excalibah*) that refuses to spoon feed its audience. It doesn’t provide easy answers, but then isn’t that life? Exhilarating and troubling.