Theatre reviews: Lament For Sheku Bayoh | Eliza | Fibres

Three new plays force us to confront past injustices, and encourage us to learn from them, writes Joyce McMillan

Saskia Ashdown, Courtney Stoddart and Patricia Panther in Lament for Sheku Bayoh

Lament For Sheku Bayoh, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh *****

Eliza, Blas Festival ***

Fibres, Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow ****

It has been a long time coming, this moment in Scottish theatre; the moment when four black people from Scotland stand on a stage, and ask us to acknowledge the profound history of empire and exploitation that lies behind our shared presence here, and the continuing racism that is its legacy. Black people are few in Scotland, relatively speaking; whereas 13 per cent of the population in London is of African or Afro-Caribbean descent, the equivalent figure for Scotland is only 1 per cent.

Yet these small numbers in no way reflect the huge impact of the slave trade, and of black slave labour, on Scotland’s modern history; the huge fortunes made and brought home in the 18th century, the great families who benefited, and the extent to which that wealth built the grand stone cities in which we now take such pride, spreading the names of slave-owning families across our street-scapes to this day.

Hardly surprising, then, that the starting point of Hannah Lavery’s great stage poem Lament For Sheku Bayoh, streamed live last weekend by the Lyceum Theatre, the Edinburgh International Festival and the National Theatre of Scotland, involves a chorus of A Man’s A Man For All That – beautifully sung, with both irony and yearning, by composer and musician Beldina Odenyo – followed by a meditation on Scotland’s misplaced sense of innocence in the matter of race and empire. Bayoh was a young man originally from Sierra Leone who died at the hands of the police in a street in Kirkcaldy in 2015. He was reported to be brandishing a knife and engaging in threatening behaviour; in fact there is no evidence that he had a weapon, or presented any major threat at all. Nonetheless, within less than an hour he was declared dead on arrival at hospital, his body covered in bruises, lacerations and signs of suffocation; and despite his family’s long and patient campaign for justice, it was announced last year that none of the police officers involved would be prosecuted in relation to his death.

Out of these bare facts, and other verbatim material from the case, Lavery has constructed an unforgettable 58 minute stage poem about Bayoh’s death, and about what it would take for Scotland, in memory at least, to gather him up from that Kirkcaldy street and name him as one of our own. Apart from Odenyo, who provides the music throughout, the three performers are Saskia Ashdown, Courtney Stoddart and Patricia Panther, each with a memorably powerful stage presence. And Lavery’s production, streamed from the stage of the Lyceum, is finally more like an oratorio that a dramatisation, and all the stronger for that; a beautiful and shattering ritual of rage and mourning that – in the year of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter – is both painfully familiar, and new in its insistence that here too, in bonnie Scotland, black people sometimes cannot breathe, purely because of the colour of their skin.

By coincidence, the Blas Festival of Gaelic music and culture – taking place online this week, until 30 November – also chose this week to release their film Eliza, a fascinating meditation by Angus Macleod on the life of Eliza Junor, the daughter of a Scottish plantation owner in Guyana and one of his black slaves, who was brought to the Black Isle with her younger brother in 1816, to receive the education their father thought they deserved. Macleod’s 28 minute film is simple and a little lacking in pace, composed entirely of short monologues to camera delivered by Eliza and various other characters. Yet a beautiful central performance by Edinburgh-based student Tawana Maramba, accompanied by Gaelic song from Eilidh Mackenzie and Ellen Macdonald, makes this another memorable story about the experience of being black in Scotland; as we begin the long process of understanding a part of our history suppressed and neglected for so long.

Untold stories are often the lifeblood of theatre, of course; and another is set to be made available this week by the Citizens’ Theatre and Stellar Quines, in the shape of the screen version of their powerful 2019 production Fibres, about the terrible toll of asbestos-related illness on the lives of working class families across Scotland. Over 90 minutes, writer Frances Poet tells the story of Jack and Beanie, married for more than 40 years when Jack’s time working in the shipyards in the early 1970s finally catches up with them, with first Jack, and then Beanie who devotedly washed his dust-covered overalls, succumbing to the terrible asbestos-related cancer mesothelioma.

Directed stage-performance-style by Jemima Levick, and beautifully filmed by Solus Productions, Fibres weaves a complex story out of this basic material, contrasting Jack’s relatively philosophical acceptance of his fate with Beanie’s political anger against companies, insurers and managers who were first warned of the dangers of asbestos as long ago as 1898, exploring the story of their long marriage, and interweaving it with their grieving daughter’s 21st century romance with a manager who can’t see the point of health and safety. In the end, though, it’s the glorious performances of Jonathan Watson as Jack and Maureen Carr as Beanie that are rightly front and centre; asking us, as the unjustly dead always do, what we will do to honour their memory, and how we will finally show that we have learned something from their loss.

Lament For Sheku Bayoh, run completed; more information at https://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/events/lamentforshekubayoh. Eliza premieres on 28 November at https://www.blas.scot/events/eliza; Fibres is available from 25 November at http://fibresfilm.co.uk/

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