Clifford Samuel and Daniel Ward in Tambo & Bones (c) Jane HobsonLos Angeles based writer Dave Harris won a number of awards for this piece which given the subject, won’t necessarily be to everyone’s taste.
Essentially a scathing commentary on the American financial and political systems, the play also manages to be a gently mocking distillation of two friends and how they individually cope with changes in their circumstances as they attempt to circumvent the white man’s imposed control of financial mechanisms and dominance over wealth generation.
Matthew Xia directs his pair of experienced theatre players Clifford Samuel (as Tambo) and Daniel Ward (as Bones) who embark on a revelatory history lesson which touches on slavery and moves through its lasting impacts on society. For the exercise to be successful, the players have to encourage the audience to actively engage with the material on a personal level, by giving genuine consideration to, and contemplation of, a fundamental switch in ethnic societal norms, all the while being bombarded with racial slurs, primarily extensive use of the word nigger.
The set design by Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and ULTZ, leaps from painted 19th century pastoral backdrops to a rave/rap concert staging. Projections even include a pastiche US President who manages to encompass the facial amalgamation of Trump, Dubya and others, spouting perpetual racist bull-shit and gabbling meaningless hyperbolic mantras. Some things never change!
After the interval the guys reappear beneath a projection screen displaying 400 Years Later denoting our attendance at an annual celebration to commemorate Tambo and Bones the resistance founding fathers who were responsible for overthrowing the white overlords and installing a new order in which an harmonious black society took root and flourished. How exactly did this come about? Well thankfully, our new world narrators decide to tell us, but better than that, they also deploy the skills of a couple of white cybertronic assistants X-Bot-1 and X-Bot-2 (Jaron Lammens and Dru Cripps respectively) who present stylistic isolated movement sequences as robots to add a neat and effective visual impact to the historic retelling in which our heroic pair develop the technology which enabled the mass Caucasian eradication, but argued about how best to utilise it.
Key to the tale, is an ironic realisation that weaponising robots to eradicate all white humans, means that their production (and the financial success garnered from their manufacture) will dry up. It’s a fairly blunt tool in this context, but given the subject matter and the show’s narrative arc, perhaps a blunt tool was always going to prove the most effective method to deliver the message.
Overall, the show presents a weirdly disconcerting theatrical experience with the mixed race audience being repeatedly addressed as niggers in the second half, as though we represent some form of single race collective. The impact is to cause any white person to question what it feels like to go through life as another race, and more particularly as a member of a minority group. The final disembodied voice declaring that patrons are permitted to remain in their seats for 15mins after the show should they need to gather their thoughts and reflect on what they have seen, may be a tongue-in-cheek device. It would certainly be appropriate for each individual to assess for themselves whether the humour deployed throughout was sufficient to assuage the trauma inherent in the central message.
