Writers: Bola Agbaje, Mojisola Adebayo, Dexter Flanders, Vanessa Macaulay and Roy Williams
Director: Matthew Xia
London’s red bus routes are the arteries that bring life to the city. For some parts of South London, especially in the years before the Elizabeth Line or even the Docklands Light Railway, they have been the only means of public transport.
And so a double-decker bus makes for the ideal setting for a collection of short plays looking at south London and its Black British residents. The time-spanning element of the production is emphasised from the beginning with Llewella Gideon’s bus conductor – a near-invisible role in today’s TfL – ushering everyone onto the bus in Deptford, and acting as a hilarious Emcee throughout the journey.
Along the route, actors hop on and off to perform their short pieces (which they each do twice, once per deck of the bus). And so we meet a young couple of Afro-Caribbeans, new to Britain and enjoying the first flush of love; a nine months pregnant woman who worries about the name with which she will crown her son; two teenage boys off to one final party before one of them goes to university, leaving his friend behind.
But while each of these tales initially seems discrete, they build to form a cohesive whole. The through-line is governed by Doreene Blackstock’s mother, Pamela, and the relationship she has with her son (Karl Collins), an architect with visions of transforming social housing in the borough.
And there is further connective tissue which reveals itself over time. For 2023 is the thirtieth anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a teenager killed at a bus stop before he could go to university to study architecture.
The Architect is not a biography of Stephen Lawrence, although the bus does pass along the street where he died. The parallels are clear, but these stories are universal. Blackstock’s mother is not Doreen Lawrence, but she could be; Dalumuzi Moyo’s teenager is not Stephen, nor is Collins a version of the boy who lived.
Even without the Lawrence connection, The Architect would be a beguiling tale of a mother’s love for her son, and how that enriches lives going backwards and forwards in time. Its resonance hits so much harder with the anniversary, though; in its resolution, there is a sense of catharsis, a populace resolving their conflicted feelings stirred up by the teenager’s death.
After the bus pulls into Woolwich’s General Gordon Square, Collins decamps to the open-air stage where in a free, complementary piece written by Roy Wiliams, The Architect’s Dream, he gives a vision of London how it could be, with architectural developments that supported its existing residents rather than building high-rise after high-rise for the benefit of property billionaires and oligarchs.
And while that work has possibly the least direct correlation with the life of Stephen Lawrence, it ends with the teenager’s face on the stage’s painted backdrop. It is an image which brings with it decades of shared pain; but now it may also represent hope.
Continues until 10 September 2023
The Architect is An Actors Touring Company and Greenwich + Docklands International Festival co-production.
