‘Black Men Walking’ review

The quiet Yorkshire hills are contested territory in rapper-turned-writer Testament’s rich, complex play. They’re a place where centuries of history are dug up, borders are crossed, independence is claimed. It follows a black men’s walking group, exploring the delicate sense of kinship three older guys find, away from the spoken and unspoken racism of their Yorkshire communities.

Matthew (Trevor Laird) is a GP married to a white woman: with the smooth eloquence of a doctor, he tries to tell the other two men that the ills of racism are on their way out. Thomas (Tyrone Huggins) isn’t buying it: a few decades older, he can’t forget the football punch-ups and the quiet humiliations of being excluded that have marked his life in Yorkshire. Younger, and more upbeat, Richard (Tonderai Munyevu) still explains that he didn’t know he was black (not really) until he moved here from Ghana.

These knotty, multi-generational conversations about racism and identity are given extra depth by Testament’s rich overlay of history and mythology.  There’s a real poetry to Thomas’s evocations of the black Romans who stalked these hills, to his ghostly sense of his unseen ancestors. And they feel even more striking after the recent discovery that ‘Cheddar Man’, Britain’s oldest skeleton, had dark skin.

Dawn Walton’s production opens with a totally magical, tingle-worthy chant where the three men summon these ancestors. But elsewhere, the magic feels fainter. It comes to the Royal Court after opening at Manchester Royal Exchange, and maybe that partly makes sense of why it sits a little strangely in the small Upstairs space. Simon Kenny’s set design doesn’t suggest the depth or unknowable danger of the dales, so the supernatural elements of Testament’s text sit a little clumsily.

These characters are sometimes broadly drawn, too, particularly aspiring MC Ayeesha (Dorcas Sebuyange) who makes a surprise appearance on the Dales, ready to mock and provoke the men out of their own complacency. With its neatly tied-together ending, ‘Black Men Walking’ ends in a gentler, easier place than you’d expect, with so many decades and centures-old conflicts at play. But its measured pace has a power of its own, carving through Yorkshire’s landscape to reveal stories that need to be heard.