Hang on, a show about Marvin Gaye with no Marvin Gaye songs in it? What’s going on, you may well ask. But no, really – though ‘Soul’ features some stirring vocal interludes, Roy Williams’s play about the Motown sound-shaper is – for whatever legal reason – not even close to being a jukebox musical.
But no matter: the hits being out of the equation, there’s a real opportunity to do something for the hardcore Gaye fans. Sadly, there’s not much of that, either.
The first half whips through Gaye’s early years at such a pace it feels superficial, serving mainly to establish a difficult relationship (to put it pretty bloody mildly) with Gaye’s father, Marvin Gay Sr, who fatally shot his son the day before his forty-fifth birthday.
The second half is far more intense and is set, to great claustrophobic effect, entirely inside the California home Gaye shared with his family following his rise to fame. The chemistry between Nathan Ives-Moiba’s Gaye, his parents and sisters (who also put in semi-awkward stints as narrators) certainly works, but the show fails to throw its weight fully behind any of the theories as to why Leo Wringer’s Marvin Gay Sr killed his son. The simple inversion of the provider/dependant dynamic is the most obvious but least explored, while Gay Sr’s interest in cross-dressing and Gaye Jr’s incestuous behaviour with his mother and sisters are flirted with but not explored in any depth.
The show is undermined by technical issues, too. Though the church-esque set looks the part, the cavernous Hackney Empire muffles any dialogue not shouted by the unamplified cast. The result is that there’s no room for subtlety, making ‘Soul’ less a rollercoaster of emotion, more a drag race with gospel tunes.