Review: TAMBO & BONES, Theatre Royal Stratford East

If there were an award for most unpredictably bonkers play of the year this would be the top contender. But there is method in the madness. Roll with it. You will be rewarded. Dance with its bombastic weirdness but fasten your seatbelt first.

It starts with semi-ironic seriousness. Tambo, the buttoned up straight man, and Bones, the wildcard, are two clowns reversed up in an existential cul-de-sac. Just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, by way of Stoppard, are trapped in Hamlet they are stuck in a ministerial show. The two, increasingly self-aware and suffocated by the plastic vision of the deep south - complete with cheap props and ‘The Turkey in the Straw’ pluckily playing in the background, they conspire to break free of their hellish non-reality.

Everything wants to break the fourth wall these days. On paper this is no different and risks the same naval gazing smugness. But on stage it is a cluster bomb. Here is a play that mercilessly hacks and slashes through everything and everyone to get to its ending. Blood and guts are spilled on the way. Ostensibly a jocular jab at the politicisation of Black art it galvanises itself to becoming something more deep cutting.

At the core it’s not so much a razor-edged critique of capitalism, but a more a grinding lament for its grim ubiquity. There is only one way out of poverty: play the game that put you there in the first place. Everything or nothing.

The second act sees Tambo and Bones become Grammy winning rappers. They fully run with the gag and a pulse pounding concert ensues. But a bling clad Tambo is weighted down by his conscience, aware that as a Black artist he is expected to commodify Black trauma for his art. He resists. Bones endorses it and shoots out empty lyrics about money and power. 

Here is the brilliant bit. Bones whips up the audience into an intoxicated frenzy, like him we are allured by the sweet treats and flashing lights. Director Mathew Xia’s lucidly conjures the pressing irony of its vacuousness and lets it hover in the room like a ghost. Art and politics are nothing but a sick beat. It’s all the same soundtrack.

Above all else Tambo and Bones feels dangerous. So much contemporary theatre postures with polemics. Harris’ lyrical but deadly sharp writing is totally disarming, it uses and abuses theatrical form with iconoclastic brutality. Sure, it is a little too gleeful in its self-awareness and often lacks subtlety, something we can probably pin on the play being an American import. But that is part of its charm.  

Rhashan Stone and Daniel Ward play Tambo and Bones respectively. Both are instantly charming and at total ease with the prosaic surrealism of Harris’ vision. Their jet like propulsion powers through the tonal fluctuations. Keeping up with them is on you.

You cannot see the final act coming. It ends in cold violence. The house lights are up. The whole performance folds in on itself. Everything burns. There is no curtain call but there is a knuckled fist in your face.

Tambo & Bones plays at Theatre Royal Stratford East until 15 July

Photo Credit: The Other Richard

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