Writer: Danny Lee Wynter
Director: Daniel Evans
“I had a dream once of playin Hamlet. Next week I’m auditionin for Horatio.” Danny Lee Wynter’s debut play reflects on being a secondary character in your own life. From a childhood dominated by an overbearing father to his adult life in the shadow of his more famous actor friend with a role in a major superhero franchise, BLACK SUPERHERO is a consistently entertaining if scattered reflection on friendship, love, family and queer identities that is often very funny but sometimes loses its central thread.
Discovering his friend King is now in an open marriage sends David into a spiral of doubt about his own failure to find love, and brings a latent attraction to the surface which they soon act on. But King is no more faithful to David than to his husband Steven, while a trip to Australia to promote King’s movie proves make or break for David’s sobriety, his balance and the implosion of identities that follows.
BLACK SUPERHERO is an incredibly witty debut play which Wynter has packed full of popular culture references and some crowd-pleasing theatrical sideswipes. Form dropping into conversation the famous ‘Narnia’ line from Gimme, Gimme, Gimme to reducing a description of Hamlet to “it’s very long,” Wynter’s play certainly knows how to draw the room into the performance with dialogue that emerges naturally and characters with lots of interesting dimensions. Directed by Daniel Evans, its 2 hours and 20-minutes, including interval, skips along pretty happily with scenes blending quickly into one another, only starting to lose momentum with a drawn-out final section where nothing quite comes of all the groundwork the writer has laid.
The play is a little overstuffed with interesting but incomplete ideas. There are a couple of lengthy debates about different kinds of queer identity and what levels of public acknowledgement is necessary, especially for someone as famous as King. Likewise, David and his friends, all actors, argue about representation versus art and whether any actor can play a role or only those with suitable experience. The audience hear both sides, but the play tantalisingly refuses to take a formal position and rarely grapples with why it is asking the question.
David’s own history is hinted at, a troubled childhood with a violent and hyper-masculine father that informs his romantic and sexual choices in the present, a suicide attempt in the recent past and an ongoing relationship with therapy that is mentioned but not fully explored. And we tend to see David as both realistic about the world and quite damaged by it, although it is not clear whether to be fully on his side or not.
The performances are uniformly enjoyable – Wynter is engaging as David, filled with complexity and a convincing emotional life that makes him an interesting protagonist while friends King (Dyllón Burnside) and Raheem (Eloka Ivo) are a believable group. Rochenda Sandall as David’s sister Syd steals the show by not taking any of David’s nonsense, putting him in his place on several occasions – a follow-up play about Syd would make a great next project.
Kinnetia Isidore and Ryan Day use costume and lighting to create a superhero motif on stage to which David is attracted and sometimes engages, although the fantasy element doesn’t quite work. Our need for superheroes and their role in Black masculinity perhaps isn’t fully worked through and Wynter has too many ideas for a single play, but he’s certainly not a secondary character anymore.
Runs until 29 April 2023
