The Legends of Them
Mo Cross Reviews at The Rep Birmingham
Photo Credit Harry Elletson
I was at the Rep last night to see The Legends of Them, an autobiographical one-woman show written and performed by Sutara Gayle, also known as Lorna Gee. The tour started in Edinburgh and has two nights in Birmingham before heading off to Manchester, Coventry, Bristol, Leeds and Brighton. If you’re lucky enough to catch the show in Leeds or Brighton you’ll also get a free late gig of female reggae artists on the 18th and 28th of November included with your ticket.
Co-created by Gayle and director Jo McInnes, it was first performed at Brixton House last year. Part auto-biography and part musical experiment, Gayle threads a narrative together from memories that came up during her time at a silent retreat in India. Once they surfaced, she knew she needed to face them head on to free herself from their legacy.
In an interview with the British Black List she says: “It’s funny how the moment you decide to be silent, is the time when you hear the most noise.
It was a great healing process for me to get the stories out and I wanted to share it and inspire others to open up to their own stories. Something shifted when I brought it to stage. I wasn’t sharing my life. I was claiming it.”
Without knowing much about her music I didn’t know if I might be out of the loop, there were certainly fans in the audience who were able to sing along unprompted at all the right parts early in the performance when the story centred on her music career, but the play is about more than just a successful Reggae star’s journey out of Brixton.
From grappling with and accepting her queerness, to dealing with long buried past trauma, some of the subject matter is pretty dark, but Gayle injects the script with a sense of humour and personality that shows how she kept going through the struggles she faced.
The performance takes place in front of a massive stack of speakers and amps, often pulsating with lights when she performs her own music, but the rest of the staging is minimal, a table, a rug and two chairs, leaving her to fill it entirely with her memories and herself. It gave you the feeling that a story this big probably needs the space.
Gayle plays all characters in turn, and her ability to change her personality, accent and dialect at a moment’s notice let her flesh out the narrative. You rarely felt she was alone on stage unless she wanted you to. Her mother’s experience of coming to England during Windrush is expressed in a song that perfectly shows the arc from expectation to disappointment, and the bitter edge that sneaks into her voice for the last chorus about a motherland waiting with open arms was subtle but deliberate.
The lyrics of the songs written for the show were expertly wielded, although the music occasionally bordered on the cheesey side. It didn’t feel like she took them too seriously though, and Gayle’s delivery, especially when playing her younger secondary-school self, was bursting with the irreverence of youth.
At one point Lorna questions her sister about their ancestral history, “Why don’t they teach this in school?” And her answer is “They don’t want you to know you have power.” But throughout her meditation she also reconnects with her African ancestor Queen Nanny, leader of the Maroons who resisted British colonialism in Jamaica, through whom she finds the power to heal, and the power to grow.
A repeated theme in her journey of self-discovery is that you can only know yourself if you know where you came from, and Sutara Gayle takes us through her own history to give us a clear picture of how and why she has become who she is today.
Get your tickets here for the final Birmingham performance on 4 October.