Review: for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (Yard Theatre)

Note: This production makes frequent references to disturbing topics, please check the Content Advice section of the theatre’s website if you have any concerns.

Review by Sam Waite

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Arriving in London with the fiftieth anniversary of its Broadway debut approaching, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf makes its UK debut having already had a Tony-nominated added to a legacy including a television adaptation and a Tyler Perry film. The play’s setup will also be familiar for many of its London audience, with Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys… taking major inspiration from Shange’s seminal work. With all this in mind, this landmark production arrives at the newly-reopened Yard Theatre with a lot of hype behind it, and a lot of hopes to live up to.

Dubbed a “choreopoem” by its author, for colored girls focuses on seven women, portrayed by five actors, whose various stories are told through a mix of monologue, poetry, and movement. Stories overlap and blend into one another, and the character taking focus shifts between and even during recitations. Two of the performers take on a pair of roles each, needing to alternate personas and distinguish these two unnamed characters. As would later be the case in Calais Cameron’s piece, these women represent experiences rather than individuals, and thus remain nameless – simply, Lady in Red, Lady in Yellow, and so on.

Shange’s seven Ladies are played in this new production by Ibilola Rossi (in Brown), Nadine Higgin (Blue), Tatenda Matsvai (Green and Yellow), Cherrelle Skeete (Red), and Alex Thomas-Smith (Purple and Orange), all of whom remain constantly on or around the stage. Rossi’s Lady in Brown opens and closes the performance, making it hard not to view the character as a leader of sorts, though the work quickly becomes a true ensemble piece with focus divided equally across the quintet. As the stories told move through the myriad agonies of these women’s lives, there is an undeniable passion behind the text.

Admittedly, this passion comes through more effectively in some moments than in others. Among this production’s more stirring moments are those where characters overlap and intermingle, a firmer sense of unity and commiseration coming through where more than one performer is allowed entry into a singular piece. Director Diane Page makes the most of these instances, moving the cast into tableaus of space and emotions shared, be they anguish or acceptance. In a space like the Yard, where there is quite literally nowhere to hide, the presence of actors not involved in a particular section can feel awkward as they are left lingering to the sides, and re-entries to begin the next work of poetry can feel overly blunt as these same actors walk in and out of focus rather than being more seamlessly integrated throughout.

Music and movement are central to Ntozake Shange’s work, song and dance both integral parts of the writing itself, and those elements remain firmly in place here. A particularly masterful stroke comes from sound designer Esther Kehinde Ajayi, where the music drops out entirely leaving the Ladies gathered in a circle, vocalising beautifully in a moment of glorious harmony. There are several crowd-pleasing moments of music, composed by Jammz, and choreography, by Ingrid Mackinnon, but while both are well-executed, there’s a strange disconnect given how tightly movement and music are tied into the text. This lack of cohesion appears elsewhere throughout this production, leaving some sequences far easier to connect with than others.

Performed straight through and running at around one hundred minutes, for colored girls is an undeniably powerful piece on paper, but something feels lost in this transition to the London stage. Thanks to dialect coach Aundrea Fudge, the show remains firmly set in and across the United States, but at times I did wonder why this was deemed necessary. With references to locations few and far between, it’s hard to understand why any change in accent was needed, the themes and story beats being as familiar to a London audience as they have always been to those in New York. Given the specific identity and presentation of the material, it also feels at times as if a focus on delivering lines with the correct cadence, the proper air of poetic verse, overtakes the opportunity to truly connect with and share the emotions behind the words.

As the Ladies in Red and Blue respectively, Cherrelle Skeete and Nadine Higgin fare the best on this front, delivering some undeniably stirring monologues with a depth of passion and understanding. All five performers have their moments of strength, of course, but their talents at times feel muted by the presentation – what Diane Page’s direction offers in staggering touches of unity, it can occasionally lack in over-orchestrated solo deliveries. Alongside the aforementioned highlights from Skeete and Higgin, especially a rousing, passionate near-finale diatribe from Skeete, some real power comes from the measured opening monologues delivered by Ibilola Rossi, some of the more subtle moments but easily among the most striking.

Colour is so vital to for colored girls both in its identity and its presentation, and this continues into the visual elements of this anniversary production. Of course, Cat Fuller’s costumes are dictated by Shange’s characters, each donning their titular colour. Tatenda Matsvai and Alex Thomas-Smith alternately adding and removing outer layers to shift between their respective dual roles, with director Page and choreographer Mackinnon creating one truly striking moment with an orange jacket thrown and caught, upon which Thomas-Smith changes roles mid-performance. The show’s wig, hair and makeup consultant, Dominique Hamilton, adds more subtly to this fixation on colour, with each actor’s makeup containing subtle traces of their signature colour, helping deepen their anonymous yet familiar personas. 

Lighting, from designer Ali Hunter, is often just as on the nose. The back wall of the theatre has each Lady’s colour throw across it as each begins a new piece of the text, which can help to remind the audience of the overarching setup, but also becomes repetitive and unnecessary as the play continues. Elsewhere, Hunter creates some far more interesting moments, including lighting paths along the floor to indicate a character’s feeling of entrapment in their neighbourhood, and bringing a dramatic touch to the previously mentioned group tableaus. Unfortunately, there are also many times when the stage is bathed too much in shadow, where the performers are obscured and the pain they often convey so starkly difficult to catch.

for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf is a commanding, compelling piece of writing whose history speaks for itself. Perhaps that rich backstory, the cultural cache attached to a half-century of adaptation and rediscovery, works against its UK premiere. A curious mix of over-reliance on the text itself and an unwillingness to completely pare down the presentation to allow it to come to the forefront means that a thrilling opening and conclusion are often let down by what comes between – on the page for colored girls is evocative and agonising, on the Yard stage it feels underbaked but overdirected.

It has been far too long a wait since the play’s conception, and there is a great deal of anticipation linked to this London run. Hopefully, many of those who have so patiently waited for their chance to see the show will find what they are hoping for, and their connection with the material is what truly matters at the end of the day. Still such an underserved group, it’s a delight to see Black women in particular given voice, even as it’s a cause for great sadness that fifty years on these stories are still so poignant and familiar. After a lengthy break to revamp the space, it’s also a joy to have the Yard Theatre back up and running, particularly with their commitment to theatre that takes risks still firmly on their radar. 

for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf plays at the Yard Theatre until October 17^th

For tickets and information visit https://www.theyardtheatre.co.uk/events/for-colored-girls/tickets/GIRLS

Photos by Camilla Greenwell