Writer: George Brant
Director: Monique Touko
How do you build a successful musical partnership? Well, for Sister Rosetta Tharpe, opposites attract, and the basis for her three-year collaboration with Marie Knight was the mixing of their music and their quite different personalities. A portrait of both women the first night they met, George Brant’s Marie and Rosetta arrives @sohoplace following a brief tour where it is transformed into an in-the-round production, leaving the musicians with nowhere to hide, even from themselves. Essentially a concert in biopic form, the vocal magnificence of the two leads nonetheless makes this a rousing audience experience.
Picked out of a quartet to partner with singer Rosetta Tharpe, Marie Knight struggles to open herself up to the earthier demands of her new co-star, who wants to push aside her gentility. In the hours before their first performance together, they feud and compromise as Marie’s deeply Christian innocence resists Rosetta’s more vigorous bluesy lifestyle. Yet, with an opportunity to escape the small town she has been living in, eventually Marie loses herself to the music and a great partnership is born.
If you go along to Marie and Rosetta just to hear Beverley Knight and Ntombizodwa Ndlovu sing, then you will be richly rewarded throughout the two acts of Brant’s show. Both are stupendous, and no one will leave disappointed as they tear their way through 14 numbers that range from deeply spiritual and worshipful songs to rocking gospel and, in the show’s most poignant number, a true blues classic – I Looked Down The Line, sung by Knight with acres of despair. Together, their voices meld as perfectly as their characters, drawing out the soulful connection that shapes Marie’s trajectory, particularly as she unfolds herself to the roots of the music.
Brant’s story, though, never lives up to these performances, a list of biographical knowledge woven into the dialogue without truly getting beneath the surface of either woman, their hard-won self-belief or the supportive warmth that brought them together. Instead, Marie and Rosetta recites Wikipedia facts – abusive husbands, segregated treatment as they play for white audiences, and clunky references to Jimi Hendrix and Elvis, who were inspired by Rosetta’s guitar skills even though she had never heard of them. There are sparks of brilliant personality – Rosetta is dry and sharp, ferocious and certain, while Marie shakes off her prim exterior to reveal her own formidable depths – yet the writing narrates their story without taking the audience into who they were.
As the show searches for an ending, even the deep tragedies that abruptly finished their partnership are tick boxes on a list of facts the show must reference. Moving away from that first night performance feels like a sentimental mistake; the audience can check the programme or read up later. What we need to see is the thawing of two actually quite strong personalities, the mentorship that Tharpe provides and the great moment when they are ready to step into the limelight together, to understand what missing element they found in each other and how the music came to mean so much to them both.
Still, there’s no show that Knight can’t make better, and Ndlovu is with her all the way.
Runs until 11 April 2026
