'Deep Azure' review — the late Chadwick Boseman's play is adventurous, committed and tragically pertinent

Read our review of Deep Azure, directed by Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu, now in performances at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to 11 April.

Summary

• Deep Azure makes its UK premiere at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
• The show was written by the late Hollywood actor Chadwick Boseman
• The story centres on Deep who is gunned down by a policeman and his grieving fiancée Azure
• It is performed with commitment and conviction by a strong cast

You’re continually caught offguard by Deep Azure, the boldly conceived play from the late, much-lamented actor Chadwick Boseman that continues a sequence of audacious programming at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse indoors at Shakespeare’s Globe. You expect to see at this address the classical canon with which this play is running in repertory, however revisionist their ballsy recent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream turned out to be.

But a nearly-three-hour fever dream about Black-on-Black violence, possessed of the sort of urgent contemporaneity one might expect at the Royal Court or the Bush? That comes as very much a surprise, until one considers that Marvel film stalwart and onetime Oscar nominee Boseman studied at Oxford and the British American Drama Academy (BADA) back in 1998 and that this play belongs to his ancillary career as a writer. The actor’s death in 2020, age 43, leaves an eternal question mark over where that second creative calling might have led him.

And so we have this play premiered by Chicago’s Congo Square theatre company in 2005 and only now receiving a UK airing. Its current director, Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu, remains best-known for his blazing work on the 2022 Royal Court entry, For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy: how apposite is that for a play centred around a character who, we’re told, is “destined to lose because of his hue”?

The reference there is to the murdered Deep (Jayden Elijah) who is gunned down by a policeman – an incident based on the fate of a Howard University classmate, Prince Jones. Deep lives on as a ghostly presence in the play that bears his name, even as Boseman’s focus as often as not is on Deep’s bulimic fiancée, Azure (Selina Jones) – a woman doing dual battle with overwhelming psychic grief and a body with which she is at grievous odds.

At its start, you wonder where on earth the play is going, not least because Paul Wills’s design of cascading orbs (globes, even?) suggests nothing so much as outsized Christmas ornaments waiting to be boxed. The first sounds are of ringtones signifying a possible mobile phone meltdown, following which appear a pair of spandex-wearing performers on apparent loan from Mamma Mia!. The costuming deliberately veers throughout from the fanciful to the functional.

A narrative soon takes shape, albeit one informed at every turn by a singular amalgam of hip hop, magical realism and Shakespeare: there are the inevitable nods to Hamlet as one might expect from a play informed by the premature death of a young man called Prince. (It would help if crucial information at the beginning weren’t drowned out by the energised ensemble.)

The adventurousness of Boseman’s language is immediately arresting. You clock his gift for rhyme – “if you are death’s angel sent to kill / then do what you will” – alongside a capacity for the blunt, harsh reality of the situation at hand. “I want the truth, whatever it costs,” we’re told after the interval, as the play builds towards an unsparing recreation of the incident reported at the start.

Acknowledgments of torture and a citizenry “still in chains” elicit knowing murmurs of assent from the audience, and the commitment and conviction of the cast are as moving as the material with which they are tasked. Beyond the sinuous, super-charged Jones, the play offers an intriguing double act in Elijah Cook and Justice Ritchie as narrators of sorts, whilst Elijah gives off the sweetness of a deeply spiritual man who has been lost to the world too soon: to that extent, the loss described within the play is echoed by that of its author.

That said, you have to wonder what edits and changes might have been brought to bear on a rambling piece that is in need of a tough-minded dramaturg to allow the material to fully sing. (The second act, wait for it, kicks off with a Mecca University chorus because, well, “it’s show time" - so why not?) As it is, we’re left lamenting the ongoing pertinence of a play steeped in anger at the “price of a Black man’s life” here performed with a revivifying passion. What's needed now is more art to complement the play's capacious heart.

Deep Azure is at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to 11 April. Book Deep Azure tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Deep Azure (Photos by Sam Taylor)