‘There’s no ocean big enough to hold these black boys’ tears,” a young man sings. But what about a genre big enough? Our Eyes Looking for God – a show that aims to explore the “Black British experience” – finds a framework for the extravagant, baroque emotions, intensities and stories of its subject matter in opera. In many ways it’s a natural fit – or could be.
Created in 2020 by writer, director and activist TD Moyo and award-wining composer Renell Shaw, the piece grows out of Moyo’s personal grief for a brother murdered in south London and the global race rage after George Floyd’s death. Moyo weaves both threads into the story of Liverpool cousins Adjani and Kamal. Adjani’s decision to leave for London sparks a final night of reminiscences, celebrations, farewells and violent tragedy for two boys who – spoiler alert – may already be dead before the action begins.
A libretto by April Koyejo-Audiger sets the tone, colliding the everyday of fried chicken, a Vauxhall Astra and designer aftershave (“Damn I smell great!”) with poetic arabesques of language. Her boys speak of “reverence” and “rites of passage”, conversation melts into meditation and monologue, just as Rennell’s score drifts from the spiky thrusts of rap into the nostalgic sway of reggae and aria-adjacent lyricism. Music director and keyboardist Luke Bacchus’s band underpins it all, Meera Raja’s cello coaxing Shane Forbes’ percussion into a duel of soundworlds, Charlie Laffer’s electric guitar a mediator and bridge between.
The same familiar strangeness shapes Amanda Mascarenhas’s set: a streetlamp twisted and sprouted into a metal tree; a car reduced to its own sketched outline. The two become a playground for Adjani (Gamba Cole) and Kamal (Themba Mvula) as well as a trio of backing dancers and singers (Amari Defreitas-Smith, Ibrahim Kanu and Josh Latunji – all from community arts organisation Trybe House), menacing in bejewelled balaclavas, their movements convulsive, charged.
It’s Cole’s Adjani who holds the stage, alive to every shifting current in score and text. Against his easy charisma, Mvula’s Kamal feels stiff, his forays into the work’s more operatic language a jarring, artificial element within the score’s many musical vernaculars, voice pushed beyond comfort in an amplified context.
Our Eyes Looking for God captures the spirit of opera – its fluidity, extremity and larger-than-life gestures – without actually creating one. This show feels like theatre-plus: a spoken drama that borrows music’s emotional storage-space when required. Nothing wrong with that, but in a story that rejects half-truths and half-measures there’s a commitment that’s missing, a risk still to take.
