The Purists – Kiln Theatre, London

Writer: Dan McCabe

Director: Amit Sharma

Dan McCabe’s The Purists, directed by Amit Sharma, is being given its European premiere at Kiln Theatre. It’s a production that simply has it all: a play about hip-hop that’s multi-layered, devastatingly witty and fast-paced, serving up constant surprises while remaining tightly framed. It’s about many things, including language itself. There are fresh, funny bursts of hip-hop as invented by four of the five protagonists.

Out on the Queens stoop of this gloriously designed set (Tom Piper), Mr Bugz, hip-hop radio DJ of household fame, hangs out with Lamont Born Cipher, a rap legend, Richard Pepple and Sule Rimi giving pitch-perfect performances as the two 40-something men. Bugz is melancholy – his mother is dying. Lamont is fierce and fiery, insisting rap is the preserve of black men. The hypocritical music industry will always promote white artists, he complains. Worse still, they exploit the fact that misogyny sells, forcing black rappers into cliched poses. But when Lamont privately performs his own rap to us, it is mysterious. Only at the end do his lines ‘Arm, Leg, Leg, Arm Head’ begin to make sense.

In the upstairs apartment lives Gerry (a fabulous performance by Jasper Britton). Gerry is an old-fashioned, opinionated white guy who loves nothing better than listening to the big Broadway musicals of yesteryear while smoking a joint. He was once a millionaire but has lost it all. The real tragedy of his past, however, only slowly emerges. We just need one allusion to the 80s to get where he’s coming from and why, as he tells us, he has no friends now. He doesn’t recognise his own bigotry, so is horrified when Bugz calls him out as a racist. Labelling a kid on the subway ‘a thug’ and ‘an animal’, Bugz spells out, is to use racist code of Fox News.

Just as the language of classic musicals is Gerry’s language, hip-hop is the language of Lamont and Bugz. It’s also the language of the two young women who meet in the play – feisty Puerto Rican Val (an energetic Tiffany Gray), friend and confidant to the two black guys, and gushing white college graduate Nancy (equally energetic Emma Kingston) who eagerly describes her project: – a rap musical about Amelia Earhart. There’ll be a highly entertaining rap battle between Nancy and Val in the second half.

But alongside this are other languages. There’s the coded language of clothes – we need Val to exclaim on the sheer extent of Bugz’s collection of box-fresh trainers. But beneath that is a far more dangerous language, the whispered language of sexuality. And this is where the play really shocks. For it exposes homosexuality or any form of LGBTQI identification as anathema to the world of rap and perhaps that to Black Americans more widely.

It’s not hard to work out which of the two hyper-masculine rappers has come to the end of the road with performing an aggressively heterosexual identity. But it is this seam of the play that proves most profound. The final scene between Bugz and Lamont is deeply moving. Too much contemporary writing insists on embracing a warm acceptance of difference. The Purists, as its title suggests, bravely holds onto the truths of strongly divergent beliefs and feelings and the bitter pain that such divergence generates.

It’s a fantastically entertaining show with real depth.

Runs until 21 December 2024