Writer: Jessica Nlabu
Director: Catherine Mieses
Coming from a short run at the Riverside Studio’s Bitesize Festival earlier this month is BEIGE, a clever two-hander about female mixed identity. Half-Swiss, half-Congolese Joy arrives at a facility that will help her become more palatable to the wider population. Her appointment proceeds like a casting to be the next new supermodel.
Shannon Kurlander, playing the unnamed analyst like Miranda Priestley, tells Joy to stand on a white cross taped to the floor. Joy, eager to please, eager to change, complies. Indeed, Joy (played by writer Jessica Nlabu) does everything she’s told to do. She sings; she dances. Kurlander tells her to tone it down. Her dancing is too much like the twerking of Nicki Minaj; her singing too full of gospel. What Kurlander means is that twerking and gospel are too Black. Joy must find a middle ground where she’s dangerous but safe, exotic yet employable, smelling of coconut vanilla scent. Joy finds herself to be a bundle of oxymorons. She must be neither Black nor white, but beige.
Some of the tests that Kurlander exacts upon her client are difficult to watch, provoking images of slave markets, while her tape measure alludes to eugenics. Both actors excel in their complex roles. Kurlander, in her cedar green power suit, exudes menace and terrifying efficiency. Nlabu’s Joy is hollowed out by Kurlander’s scrutinous prodding to the extent that she realises that her identity is forged by response. Her core self is all but erased.
While BEIGE’s main focus is on intersectionality, the double bind of Joy being Black and being a woman, the 50-minute play also examines gender in a singular way. All women are taught to be passive and soft and the right side of sexy. Perhaps Kurlander’s character becomes aware of the restrictions placed on her identity too. This could explain the scene where she crawls upon the floor.
Just when the show seems to have exhausted all the possible types of ‘acceptable’ woman that Joy could strive towards, BEIGE shifts gear and there are some lovely silent scenes where the women find that they share the same difficulties, even perhaps, by the end, that they share the same body. The ambiguous end underscores the predicament that Joy is in.
Runs until 29 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
