HighRise Entertainment: The UK Drill Project – Barbican, London

Writer and Director: Dominic Garfield

Music has been criminalised argues Dominic Garfield in his new social justice show HighRise Entertainment: The UK Drill Project showing at the Barbican as the winner of this year’s The Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award. Specifically, Drill music, the lyrics and videos of which have been used as evidence to (wrongly, Garfield argues) prosecute young men for violent gang-related crime. This 85-minute sketch-show and exhibition is a plea to separate art and life.

The evening begins with a chance to view the accompanying exhibition that helps to prepare the audience for some of the issues explored in the show. With DJ Skanda Sabbagh providing the soundtrack, this single-room takeover in the Barbican Pit has several exhibits that explore the visual aesthetic of drill music and balaclava-style head coverings worn by its performers as well as the context in which the music is created and received.

One wall looks at the hypocrisy of modern justice in which young Black men are targeted based on their music choices while a wall of genuine newspaper headlines report on criminal activity within the police force itself. Across the room “Dr Drill” performs a music-based stress test on a member of the audience with one participant showing greater spikes of anxiety listening to Mozart than to Abba or Drill music.

Any overly prompt audience members who go in when doors open at 7.30pm will have a bit of a long wait after that for the show itself to start at around 8.20pm but what follows is a mixture of acted scenes, pre-recorded and live video footage, music performance and voiceover testimony that creates the roughly chronological experience of Drill performer and member of O79 crew, TJ, who is held on remand for the murder of a young man from a rival gang.

But Garfield explores several themes across the show including the effect on the wider community, the activities of the police and the aspirations of the teenagers the show depicts as well as investigating the excitement within the music scene as the group craft lyrics together, celebrate hitting a million likes on social media and find fulfilment in creative expression.

And there are many layers to HighRise Entertainment: The UK Drill Project that use both humour and more emotive messaging to explore the show’s themes. It opens with a goofy sitcom scene as the O79 crew relax, play video games and banter with one another. This group scene recurs later as they riff together to create their hit song with member Lulu (Lauryn Louise) putting TJ (Nilez) in his place with some improved lyrics.

Garfield also uses other types of recurring storylines including TJ’s experiences in prison with calls to sister Deborah discussing the inevitability of his sentencing and a parallel male narrative exploring a young man’s (Ché Gordon) attempts to control his anger and re-route a desire for revenge in order to stay three steps ahead of social assumptions. The latter results in a deeply moving monologue about loss and the perpetual cycles of violence that ends the show on a powerful note.

The best moment, however, is a lightly comic but pointed sketch about police ‘translators’, based on the existence of a real team whose job it is to understand the lyrics of Drill songs and scour them for evidence including intent to kill and to supply drugs. The comedy policemen Bars (Gerel Falconer) and Railings (Oliver Tunstall) bring the various strands of the show together and, accompanied by news style footage and statistics, really underscore Garfield’s central message about the difference between fact and fiction.

Invariably with an episodic show, not all of the segments land equally well and the acting is sometimes variable, but the performance energy and the cumulative effect of The UK Drill Project are undeniable.

Runs until 12 November 2022