Portrait and Labels (RADAR Festival), Bush Theatre, W12

reviewed for The Times, 19 November 2015

Joe Sellman-Leava in Labels. (Photo credit: Anna Bruce)

Four years old, and the Bush Theatre’s RADAR is well established as London’s most inquisitive, unpredictable writing festival. Not everything is a world premiere: Chris Brett Bailey’s This Is How We Die, a viciously bleak state-of-the-nation monologue, has had a cult following since its earliest development in 2013. The comedian Lily Bevan’s Pheasant Plucker was an Edinburgh hit. Yet pairing known winners with newer finds guarantees the festival some bite, and the tandem-relay of double bills means that each night’s programme has a unique buzz.

This week I saw two monologues offering two different ways of talking about race. Yet while Racheal Ofori’s Portrait sizzles with verve, nuance and poetry, Joe Sellman-Leava’s gimmicky lectureLabels has all the monotony of an over-rehearsed TED talk.

Slumped in a swivel chair, Ofori’s Candice is a sixth-former trapped in a session with her PC (“politely condescending”) counsellor. She’s not optimistic about her life chances, unless she can find a rich bloke (“they say money can’t buy you happiness, but I’d rather cry in a Porsche than at a bus stop”). Intercut with Candice’s counselling sessions, however, are Ofori’s luxurious fantasies of the black female experience: competitive NY dieter to over-optimistic Ghanaian immigrant. Back in her chair, Candice undercuts each one with a teenager’s truth-bomb.

Sellman-Leava’s Labels, despite an Edinburgh Fringe First, is more disappointing. The Ugandan Asian experience is one of precarious survival, scapegoated and resented. Not that we learn much here. The child of a white mother and a Ugandan Asian father, Sellman-Leava offers a good line in mimicking baddies (Nigel Farage, Katie Hopkins, David Starkey), before long-listing his experiences of British racism — but then it goes on and on and on. Look up Nassim Soleimanpour’s Blank later in the week for some real theatre.