Small Stage: Big City. The Lonely Londoners gets a modern stage adaptation @ Jermyn Street Theatre.
What does the big city mean to you? What does it mean to live and breathe the same air as millions of others each and every day? Commuting and living in a hub of innovation and prosperity? Then ask yourself, what does it mean to be second best? Overlooked by a society that prospers around you, and ridiculed because of the colour of your skin. Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners has been an indisputable bastion of the Black British experience since the mid 1950’s when it was first printed, and now, in 2024 a brilliant and moving recreation of Selvon’s poignant story have been recreated for the stage. Roy Williams’ adaptation of Selvon’s definitive work manages to squeeze the vast expanses of London’s endless sprawl, onto a stage no larger that your living room.
The Lonely Londoners is a piece of writing that has been close to me for a number of years. Being a text that I read and wrote about at university, hearing that it had been adapted into a theatre production was a cause for great excitement. I initially worried that any adaptation limited to a single stage would fall short of the scale that Selvon manages to portray in his writing. Roy Williams, the plays adaptor and director, cleverly does so in a way that is beautifully fitting to its predecessor. From the opening lines of Williams’ adaptation I see that Gamba Cole, Tobi Bakare, Romario Simpson, Gilbert Kyem Junior, Shannon Hayes, Carol Moses and Aimee Powell bring more than enough stage presence to embody London and its enormity.
The story follows Moses, played by Gamba Cole, and the friends he has picked up in his years as a Londoner. There’s Lewis and Big City, two fellow Caribbean migrants who moved to the City of London in the 1950’s. The name Moses is notable within the black experience in the London the audience is invited to watch. He is the point of call for anyone taking the trip over to London from Trinidad and Jamaica. Lewis (Tobi Bakare) and Big City (Gilbert Kyem Jnr) are two such examples of men taken under Moses’ wing. They come by his bedsit in Bayswater for advice and clean clothes and cigarettes almost daily, something that has clearly been the case for years already. We join the trio as Henry Oliver (Romario Simpson) knocks on Moses’ door looking for guidance and hospitality. Henry, who goes by Galahad, has just arrived on British soil and through his triumphs and defeats, we are treated to a look into what it means to take on life in the big city as a Lonely Londoner.
Roy Williams delves into the character of Moses and how he came to be the pillar of his community. He has tense and vivid dream-like conversations with a woman named Christina (Aimee Powell), and as we learn more about her and who she is to Moses, the scope of what he has left behind for a city that fails him over and over becomes clear. This is not a game, as much as he jokes with Lewis, Big City and Galahad, failure is not an option for him and his friends.
Through an engaging use of lighting and brilliant spacing and movement, The Lonely Londoners at the Jermyn Street Theatre uses the next 1 hour and 45 minutes to transform the tiny theatre space in Picadilly Circus into a bustling city-scape with palpable tension. Playing out on stage is the disconnect between new and old ways of thinking, between home and where one happens to live, and between Black and White.
We meet Lewis’ Family that follow him to London after reading the grand stories of a city of progress and fortune that he wrote about in his letters home. His mother Tanty (Carol Moses) and wife Agnes (Shannon Hayes) begin their own journeys in this strange city, learning to navigate the reality that awaits them. They are ignored and antagonised by locals and neglected by their main support system, Lewis. Tanty and Agnes place a strain, both emotionally and financially, on the precarious lifestyle that Lewis has cultivated for himself in London, a dynamic that plays out in a heartbreaking way throughout the play.
Meanwhile, Big City, an easy-going and impressionable young man, is battered by an onslaught of belittlement and nay-sayers that begin to wear away at his defences, taking him down a dark path of hatred and revenge that threatens the life he wants. All four men face vices that seek to tear them down in both the very structure and institutions of 1950’s London, and within their own shortcomings and egos.
As an audience member I saw a group of men left behind by their peers and that neglect reveals itself in the palpable loneliness that all four battle. Big City says it best early in the play, quoting a saying from back home: “Out of many, we are one people.” While Big City means to demonstrate the power of this statement to the apathetic white population of London, The Lonely Londoners depicts a reality where blackness makes you the ‘other’ and loneliness becomes deadly. It is only by leaning on one another, and sharing the hardships, that these Lonely Londoners can hope to come out on top in the vast, unforgiving city. The play is hilarious at times, ultimately uplifting and uniquely ‘London-y’, a sure-fire hit for anyone reading who calls London their home. I greatly recommend going to see the play before the end of its run on April 6th, to see life, love and London brought together beautifully on one (impressively tiny) stage.
29th February – 6th April 2024 @ The Jermyn Street Theatre