Hymn review thoughtful black bromance shuns convention | Theatre
Lockdown cultureTheatre This article is more than 3 years oldReviewHymn review – thoughtful black bromance shuns convention
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Danny Sapani and Adrian Lester strike up true chemistry in a poignant friendship drama that wears its racial context lightly
Danny Sapani describes this play about an oddball male friendship as an “unconventional love story”. He is one half of its cast, playing the gruff, comprehensive school-educated Benny to Adrian Lester’s middle-class Gilbert, who he meets on the day of the latter’s father’s funeral. It is a prickly encounter, but over the course of a year, they become part of each others’ families.
It is unconventional in other ways too: a drama with a symbiotic musicality woven into it, so that Sapani and Lester intermittently break out in song and dance, beginning with an a cappella rendition of Lean on Me, but also with protracted scenes singing and dancing with accompaniment. Live-streamed by the Almeida theatre and written by Lolita Chakrabarti, it is also an odd story, at once about everything and nothing, with as much of a television soap opera feel as a script for theatre. Yet it works and creates a chemistry between the actors that even the two-metre rule cannot mar.
In some ways, it is an uneven story whose plotting feels contrived, but which is elevated by the intensity and passion of the performances. Sapani, in particular, soars in every scene and has a remarkably strong singing voice, while Lester’s Gil is a smoother, more inscrutable character, played with charm.
Artfully directed by Blanche McIntyre under socially distanced conditions, Hymn is not just a bromance but about fathers, sons, brothers, and the daily vernacular of male friendship – how men express their intimacies or keep themselves hidden. Its themes chime with the news reports of depression, drink and high suicide rates among men, but the drama never announces its issues. It stays a miniature study of Benny and Gilbert from beginning to end.
In the early part of their friendship, they are often doing something else – drinking, sparring in the gym, dancing to old LPs. They shake their middle-aged hips and attempt to breakdance to Will Smith, Chic, the Temptations, and these scenes are up close, physical and joyously silly. Being a black British man seems to be a covert subject of the drama too. Again it never declares itself, but is referred to in passing: how Gilbert’s Jamaican-born father inculcated a family ethos to “work twice as hard”; the ways in which official history on sugar plantations so often fails to mention slavery; how a woman labels Gilbert “aggressive” when he addresses her politely; and further afield, violence in places like Mississippi. None of this is named in the context of race but is an unspoken understanding – and all the more powerful for the ellipses around it.
The staging is as striking as it is spare. There is very little on set: a piano with a metronome, portable boxes with props inside, a table and chairs that stand in for a pub. Lighting designer Prema Mehta uses light and dark in clever ways to heighten the drama and delicately reminds us of its theatricality without needing to send the camera roving into the auditorium. The sound, orchestrated by Gregory Clarke, feels magnified too: clear, strong and dramatic, from the ticking of the metronome to the actor’s voices.
Sapani and Lester inhabit this stage so fully that they bring this small story, of two men becoming friends, fully to life. It is an odd bromance, but its risks pay off.
Hymn is available online until 21 February.
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