Five Years with the White Man – VAULT Festival, London

Writers: Eloki Obi & Saul Boyer

Director: Sam Rayner

Eloki Obi and Saul Boyer’s single-hander Five Years with the White Man is well worth a look. Part bioplay and part metatheatrical meditation on how artistic creation can provide solace in times of grief, the narrative has two interweaving strands.

The first concerns the extraordinary life of Augustus Merriman-Labor, a long-forgotten Sierra Leone born barrister and satirist. The second concerns Dumebi, the play’s putative British-Nigerian performer, who has taken it upon himself to tell Merriman-Labor’s story on stage as a “personal act of bereavement therapy”, in homage to his recently deceased partner. This continual shift, from historical events to Dumebi’s fourth wall breaking reflections on his own life, poses a potent question about the nature of bereavement, and indeed about what may or may not have changed for gay black Britons over the past century.

Merriman-Labor’s recently re-published 1909 spoof, Britons Through Negro Spectacles, sees the narrator pass a day accompanying a newly arrived African friend around London, artfully subverting the colonialist eye usually fixed on Africa. The book’s publication attracted widespread censure at the time and may have contributed to the author’s legal disbarment; events conflated here with the collapse of Merriman-Labor’s possibly intimate relationship with a close male friend. Obi and Boyer provide just enough facts (and speculations) to make the drama feel realistic, without losing sight of the humour at the heart of the author’s own writing. The contemporary story of Dumebi and Alfred’s doomed romance is deftly worked and intensely touching, adding depth and texture to what might have been mere interesting historic curiosity.

Joseph Akubeze is tremendous at navigating the switch between the charismatic, sometimes bombastic figure of Merriman-Labor, and the gentler more tentative Dumebi. Occasionally it is harder to differentiate the other dozen or so characters Akubeze is asked to inhabit; in the dialogue between the satirist and his conflicted lover John it is particularly easy to get lost. That minor grumble aside, this is a delightful gem.

Runs until 5 March 2023