Camden Fringe 2025: Scenes with Black Folk – Camden People’s Theatre, London

Writer and Director: Joy Nesbitt 

Scenes with Black Folk is an ever-shifting musing on blackness, a musing that tackles the micro and macro with the same sincere respect. It is not identity theatre; it is an embrace of the messiness of race. What race means, how it cleaves into the lives of black people, how it makes everything feel like the great whiteness project and complicates the search to simply become somebody.

In framing itself as a ritual, Scenes with Black Folk leans into the lack of clarity around race: like a ghost that haunts every theme and character in the multiple scenes that comprise the piece, we don’t quite know whether to believe in race, but we know it when we see it.

The spectre of race is mirrored by this ritualistic structure. However, by embracing a murky form, the play as a whole feels unguided, as if every scene is an interlude to some larger, missing whole. Nevertheless, there is a palpable commitment to the majority of these scenes in all their discomfort. This is true both for the lighter dancing scenes and the darker scenes of violence and racism. These come and go in no particular order, which provides a nice respite from the darkness but leaves any one emotional nexus feeling only partially explored. This is highlighted by the differing concerns between scenes, which leave one feeling as though the piece was devised by four different people with four disparate worries.

The least compromising of these worries comes from Ryan Yengo’s character, unafraid to push the boundaries with the audience, always daring them to enter into the uncomfortable, the frightening, the guilty. Likewise, Kennedy Jopson excels in her willingness to embrace the imperfect morality of righting racial wrongs. Lightness is still abound, though, as both she and Joycelyn Manu delight with excellent singing, and comedic turns come from Jay Lafayette Valentine and Yengo who create a pair of insufferable white men in a pointless battle for who has the largest manhood.

In a theatrical environment that is too often afraid to ask deep questions of race, preferring instead to just agree that “things are very bad”, Scenes With Black Folk offers a nuanced and complex study of modern black Britain from a Gen Z lens.

Runs until 22 August 2025

Camden Fringe runs until 24 August 2025