REVIEW: The Lonely Londoners at Jermyn Street Theatre 29 Feb – 6 April 2024

'a very strong play that has lost some of its source material’s bite' ★★★★

What better challenge for a BAFTA-winning playwright to tackle than a book described by Wikipedia as having “no plot in the usual sense of the term”?  That’s not quite accurate: But Sam Selvon’s classic novella about the Windrush generation is famously episodic, a tangle of tales about hope and hopelessness. Selvon centres his book around the long-suffering Moses, an early arrival to London, but weaves in and out of the lives of all those fellow immigrants that come to him for help. Roy Williams has bitten off a hell of a task: translating a kaleidoscope of anecdotes into a 90-minute story for the stage.

The result is a very strong play that has lost some of its source material’s bite.

First, Williams has cut more than half of Selvon’s characters, rejigging their relationships and reducing “the boys” around Moses (Gamba Cole) to three: Galahad (Romario Simpson), fresh-faced and hopeful, Big City (Gilbert Kyem Jnr), upbeat and reckless, and Lewis (Tobi Bakare), insecure and lashing out. As for the women, he has compressed Selvon’s two matriarchs into one (Carol Moses’s Tanty, sternly excellent), but overall gives far more weight and depth to the female roles than Selvon ever intended. Shannon Hayes’s Agnes gets as much stage time as her abusive husband Lewis, while Aimee Powell’s Christina, Moses’s past love, is a new invention.

This hints at the double-edged sword of Williams’s adaptive choices: Narratively, dramatically, it’s all for the good. The cast is uniformly strong. Gamba Cole provides the show’s warm centre, and everyone meshes together as an ensemble while making full use of individual moments in the spotlight. It’s particularly satisfying to see Agnes given personality, agency, and a voice that her book version was never granted. But this is tightly linked to a decision to soften the book’s brutality, simplify its morals and quietly sand back those attributes of its protagonists that a modern audience might flinch at. Characters’ questionable decisions are rooted in tragic back-stories; domestic violence is not constant but a breaking point, and is ultimately punished and reviled; neighbours pull together in true support.

That’s not quite the world Selvon described.

Where Williams does preserve the full weight of the original’s violence is in how the West Indian community is treated by the white Londoners that surround them. His decision to write every interaction with a white character as direct address to the audience is clever, the force of the racism and othering they’re subjected to is clear. “We are British subjects!” one man protests. “That don’t mean shit,” another replies. Some things don’t change.

The set is simple: eight trunks are lined up against the back wall, one for each of the actors to retreat to and perch on between scenes. It’s the rows of lightbulbs above their heads that take care of most of the location changes, flashing in and out of the letter-and-number jumbles that make up our city’s postcodes. This is clearly not just a play set in London, but for Londoners—an audience that can immediately decode NW1, SE10 and SE1 into their respective neighbourhoods and associations.

Ebenezer Bamgboye’s direction is assured, expertly switching between rapid-fire dialogue and slow-motion imagery. He has interwoven the avalanche of text with music and choreography, making particularly excellent use of his movement director Nevena Stojkov’s skills. The effect is an explosion of life that regularly stills into swaying plateaus of longing, or pain, or threat, and bookends the show with connection and emotions, rather than words.

This is an powerful show that has—for better or worse—smoothed out and sweetened the book on which it is based.

Photography: Alex Brenner

Box Office https://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/show/the-lonely-londoners/

Cast

Lewis: Tobi Bakare

Moses: Gamba Cole

Agnes: Shannon Hayes

Big City: Gilbert Kyem Jnr

Tanty: Carol Moses

Christina: Aimee Powell

Galahad: Romario Simpson

Production Team

Author: Sam Selvon

Adaptor: Roy Williams

Director. Ebenezer Bamgboye

Designer: Laura Ann Price

Costume Designer: Anett Black

Lighting Designer: Elliot Griggs

Sound Designer: Tony Gayle

Casting Director: Abby Galvin

Assistant Director: Paloma Sierra

Movement Director: Nevena Stojkov

Voice & Dialect Coach: Aundrea Fudge

Production Manager: Lucy Mewis-McKerrow

Stage Manager: Summer Keeling

Set Builder: Tom Baum

Set Electrics: Edward Callow

Production Technician: Heather Smith

Executive Producer: David Doyle

Producer: Gabriele Uboldi

Reviewed by Anna Clart