The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars, Theatre Royal Stratford East, review: picks identity politics over plot

Theatreland is awash with debut voices right now, as producers and programmers embrace the post-Covid rallying call for more diverse stories to be heard on stage. This is a good thing, obviously, and there have been some scorchers – I particularly loved Amy Trigg’s very funny monologue about living with spina bifida, Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me, which has just finished a run at the Kiln.

But in the scramble to make sure everyone is heard, there are signs that theatre is in danger of prioritising identity politics above all else. Such as this debut one-hander by newcomer Dipo Baruwa-Etti, about a young black woman furiously grieving the racially motivated murder of her beloved twin brother, and which exemplifies the growing cultural trend to prioritise how a person feels over a critical engagement with the world in which we live.

We meet Femi, played in Nadia Fall’s production with a restless, muscular vigour by Kibong Tanji, on the eve of the trial. She’s in a bit of a state: she woke up that morning to find the late Seun at the end of her bed. Rather like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, he keeps reappearing: in the bathroom of the club she visits for a spot of catharsis later that night; on the steps outside the court a day or so later. What does he want?

She finds herself replaying the night of his murder, even though she wasn’t there, and her rage and grief are accelerated by her apprehension that justice won’t be done. When the evidence of Seun’s white girlfriend, Lexi, with him at the time of the killing, is proven to be inconsistent, Femi’s belief that the system is stacked against her boils over into vengeful, militant self-righteousness.

Baruwa-Etti’s rough-edged street poetry spits with baleful fury and is spiked with moments of glinting humour: on the day of the trial, Femi’s friends Tiff and Diya pat their weaves and paint their nails “like they boutta go ta uh Burberry show.” Femi, as she paces back and forth on Peter McKintosh’s abstract geometric set, is haunted, too, by visions of the accused men treating her brother’s “charcoal skin like concrete”, and her heightened state of mind has a hallucinatory quality that blurs timelines and locations to occasionally powerful effect.

But most of the time I felt stuck inside a very bad Greek tragedy. There’s a lot of generic talk about pain and rage. More problematically, Baruwa-Etti enshrines Femi’s right to her implacable feelings of injustice so completely, you wonder if he’s decided that considerations such as narrative plausibility and authorial objectivity can simply go hang. One plot point in particular, concerning a key witness, seems purely in the service of confirming Femi’s conviction that the system is inherently racist, regardless of the fact that it defies credibility.

In fact Femi’s actions are so absurd, and their consequences so preposterous, one wonders if we are meant to assume they are fantasies in her head, yet the writing is so unstable it’s impossible to know for sure. One can’t fault the energy of the production, nor Tanji’s performance, but I’m not sure this chaotic, overwrought piece does much to advance conversations about race.

Until Jun 19. Tickets: 020 8534 0310; stratfordeast.com