Bangers – Arcola Theatre

“A lyrical love letter to UK garage,” Bangers is a mixed bag mix tape of bright futures and crushed dreams. Under the neon glow of Laura Howard’s chilled/chilly lighting design, the Arcola Theatre is transformed into a concert venue.

DJ Tanya-Loretta Dee cues up tracks under an industrial scaffold as audiences file into the space, meander across the stage’s set of club speakers, and make their way to their assigned seats. There’s a strange uneasiness to the arrangement of the space which places a playing stage not above its audience but in the arena pit of the small Hackney theatre. Very much a North London storytelling theatre, and despite its ushering staff’s best efforts the atmosphere cultivated in the room is not that of bouncer patrolled nightclub where the music is booming and the beats are banging.

Every aesthetic element of the performance is distressingly muted and despite efforts by all cast members to get the crowd into the groove, audiences remain unmoved. Chris Sonnex’s subdued direction plays at odds with writer and performer Danusia Samal’s bright and bubbly script. Her performance as sad girl Aria to Jim Caesar’s lost boy Clef is sometimes flinchingly self-conscious and undermines the performance of the other captivating characters she embodies in supporting his story.

The twin narratives encircle each other tightly and there is no excess of plot in the show’s seventy-minute runtime but there is some glut of sound and the show’s track list could benefit from some deep cuts. Duramaney Kamara’s composition is consummate but crowded and the performance’s garage sound makes it difficult to parse the poetry of its lyricism especially in its most emotive moments. The heart is there however and both clarity of purpose and musical enthusiasm are evident in every element of the experience.

This staging however fizzles where it should pop off and ends up giving more skips than bops.

Reviewer: Kira Daniels

Reviewed: 23rd July 2024

North West End UK Rating: