Misty
Bush Theatre, London

THERE are two burning questions at the heart of Arinze Kene’s extraordinary play Misty — what is a “black” play and what does it mean to write one?

Kene, who also performs in this visceral production, tells the story of a black man who gets into a fight with a drunk white male passenger on a London bus and his anger and sense of ostracism informs his narrative about institutional, structural violence.
But his friends Raymond and Donna chastise him for writing the kind of work that “white audiences are interested in seeing about black people,” a play about “black trauma.”

At the core of the story is the representation of the capital as a living body, with the boroughs organs, the roads capillaries and the people blood cells and, at the opening, Kene draws the audience into an image that momentarily appears beautiful.

Yet that’s only fleeting. Not all people are blood cells and the black man is a “virus.”

The image, shocking and powerful, is an indictment of London’s race politics. Just as the capital lives and breathes, so does Kene’s central image and, as the story progresses, there's a radical shift. Suddenly white people become the virus, with gentrification ripping communities from neighbourhoods and homes and destroying small businesses.