Review Chigger Foot Boys

Peter Barker is impressed by a new Great War play charting how the experience of loyal Jamaican volunteers eventually strengthened the bid to break free from the British Empire

Chigger Foot Boys
by Patricia Crumper

The Domino Effect
https://www.tara-arts.com/

When Britain entered the First World War, the British Isles were not the only islands dragged into the conflict.

For Britain still had an Empire, the envy of rival nations including Germany, and war against Britain triggered its own domino effect, drawing in its subjects, including over 15,000 West Indian volunteers, to fight for the mother country.   

Chigger Foot Boys is a timely reminder of the human role played in an inhuman conflict by the people of the West Indies who served in the British Armed forces but faced discrimination from their white colleagues and colonial masters as well as death.

Patricia Crumper's new play starts in a rum bar in Jamaica in 1914 where banter, dominoes and emotions are all played with.

Structured as a series of flashforwards, always returning to the Kingston bar, it tracks and backtracks through the Empire’s conflict: how it affected lives in Jamaica and beyond; how hopes were met and dashed and futures shaped.

Chigger foot boy is  a West Indian derisory term for the itinerant workers of the countryside,  boys too poor to afford shoes whose feet are afflicted by a blood-sucking bug, the chigger.  Mortie (played with wide-eyed honesty by Ike Bennett), a future army recruit, is up from the country for the first time, entering a Kingston rum bar.

Behind the bar is Medora (convincingly feisty Suzette Llewellyn), a strong-minded businesswoman .  She is pursued by handsome and worldly-wise Linton (Stanley J. Browne in an engaging perfomance), who is a career soldier.

They are joined by two middle-class brothers in their late teens and, like Mortie, future volunteers for King and Country. Charming Roy (John Leader), the younger brother and Rhodes-Scholar Norman (Jonathan Chambers), who later took the lead, rising up from the ranks of war veterans, in the fight for Jamaican independence.  .

From here there are highs, and then the predictable deaths -- punctuated by the institutional and personal racism that the chigger foot boys encountered fighting for an Imperial government which considered them only fit for labour battalions and almost entirely excluded them from the officer class. 

Some survived and. inspired by the leaflets of nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, started to make sense of their own lives.  

The future is really in Norman’s hands and Chambers gives a tender and complex performance. Where Medora’s independent spirit and Garvey-inspired radicalism are emotional drivers of the play, it is Norman’s speech towards the end which locates its guts.

“People like us, people who have bought into the illusion that we are better than those around us because the Empire pats us on the head and allows us a little education, we’re just grist to the mill. Cannon fodder. And the closer we are drawn to the maw of the machine, the deeper we look into its heart…".

Chigger Foot Boys is a gripping, vivid production with a strong cast, directed by Irina Brown. Set designer Louis Price uses the theatre's bare brick back wall as backdrop, decorated only with an outline map of Britain and one of Jamaica, both painted with the Union Jack. The turning pages of a calendar signal scene changes. 

The little known tale of the Jamaican contribution to First World War victory, its tragedies and consequences, is a story that deserves exploration.  Turning Chigger Foot Boy from an insult into a term of honour, the Chigger Foot Boys is a dramatically satisfying and thought-provoking green light play,

Review The Etienne Sisters

The Etienne Sisters

by Ché Walker 

Sibling Symphony

http://www.stratfordeast.com/whats-on/all-shows/the-etienne-sisters

We've come a long way from when Anton Chekhov wrote "The Three Sisters"  - a few world wars, a Cold War and now it's difficult to decipher what's a civil war, what's a world war and what's a computer game with every fatal, maiming or displacing consequence.

It may be a plus that The Etienne Sisters, a 90-minute, no-interval three-hander, written and directed by Ché Walker with songs by Annoushka Lucas and Sheila Atim,  planted this thought in the mind of TLT and her getaway car. 

On the other hand, there were times when this "play with songs" reminded them of the Scottish island fishing expeditions which had taken on a prominent role by the final scene. 

Three "griefed up" sisters, Bo (Allyson Ava-Brown), Tree (Nina Toussaint-White) and Ree (Jennifer Saayeng), all sharing the same father (presumably with eponymous Francophone Etienne name), come together for the funeral of their mother and stepmother. 

Opening credits rolling on back wall projections as pianist (Nikki Yeoh) plays with a classical flourish may give us a clue this isn't just a family history but ambitiously attempts to put a perspective on TV, film, literature and music as a whole.  And maybe war, politics, economics, technology and history itself.

Half sister Bo is a trickster, fleeing a drug gang boss with the surname of a French movie director of gangster movies (!!!).

Bo  disrupts the cooperative unity of supermarket checkout "girl" Tree, also apparently given responsibility for delivering store cash, and her dependent sister Ree.

The three actors discharge their roles and songs with aplomb but in the end the throwing in of disparate narrated plot threads in mainly static monologues proved underwhelming and lacked compelling pace. 

Maybe the piece, with its attempt at a playful dissection of drama and history, falls victim to the very forms it discusses - for it turned into a telegraphed predictable soap alternating with episodes from what felt like a different play.

And despite evocative set, lighting and video design by Ti Green, Arnim Friess and Louis Price respectively, TLT and her motorised steed did wonder whether it would have worked better in a smaller space and even as an entirely sung-through piece.  While it feels like a flawed work in progress, an amber light for its ambition, ideas and performances.

Tickets to The Etienne Sisters 
courtesy of 

theatrebloggers.co.uk