Andrew Haydon
posted 16 October 2006

For those in the know, shows by Chris Goode are perhaps as eagerly anticipated as new work from Tom Stoppard is by more mainstream audiences. Only a fortnight ago Goode opened his own new show, Longwave, in Newbury, and now here he is again, popping up with a directing and sound design credit on Harold Finley's one-man show at the Oval House. Although Goode may be the bigger draw here, at least for theatrical types, this is not a typical Chris Goode Show in any recognisable sense, but very much the brainchild of writer and performer Harold Finley.

It begins with a hapless stoner explaining how one day he was so mashed that he ended up taking rubbish he had meant to take to the bins onto a bus with him, and resolving to sort his act out - albeit by becoming a drug dealer, and concludes with a 106-year old Mississippi great-grandmother counting her blessings and her offspring, before the writer/performer seems to step out of role, and, as himself, briefly offering an encomium on the merits of Grandmaster Flash & the 3 MCs and the world of hip hop that they sired.

In between, for an hour and a half, Finley raps, pouts, shouts, dances and sweats his way through a staggering number of seemingly random monologues, slipping from character to character until, through initially insignificant details, we begin to see that all the characters are caught in the same vast spider's web of relationships, fate and chance, bound together by chance meetings or lineage.

This sense of interlinkedness, or rather clannishness, is something in which the play takes a great interest. As far as it is possible to discern, all the characters are intentionally black - rather than characters of indeterminate race played by a black actor. And race is certainly a theme, here; the penultimate monologue from the 106-year-old great-grandmother recalls that her father had been a slave - it is that recent, we are forcibly reminded. Were this play the product of a white writer, it might quite reasonably have be questioned over its pandering to stereotypes of the black community: this is, at least in part, a universe of drug dealers, beaten-up girlfriends and rappers. To balance this, there are also fiery gospel preachers and elderly American ladies of great dignity - again, well-worn stereotypes of a different order. There are also a number of homosexual and transsexual characters, who again, run the risk of seeming like clichés at times. Of course, it is reductive to talk about these characters of his in terms of types, but that is how they are in danger of coming across - each one ticking some box, until the whole range of well-worn clichés has been accounted for. Although, for a piece which brings together black gay men and hip-hop - it is surprising that the genre's ferocious homophobia is never once touched upon. Finley, it would seem, is fan enough to turn a blind eye where necessary.

Despite these potentially uncomfortable elements of stereotype, there is something in the writing, and in the wider picture, which excuses these choices of subject - as if, by drawing them all together into a longer, bigger narrative, their relationship to something other than their one world lessens the reductiveness and transforms the cliché into something new.

Till 21 October 2006