Torn

The story told by Femi Oguns in the new production at the Acola Theatre is at least as old as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Torn revolves around a love story between two young adults against the will of their families. The twist that the author gives to this tried and tested plot is that the play’s bigotry, racism, and petty-mindedness takes places within what outsiders usually call ‘the Black Community’.

The Nigerian David (Femi Oguns) is in love with the Caribbean Natasha (Kelle Bryan) – an impossible alliance for both their families. David’s sister Kemi (Jocelyn Jee Esien) detects a fundamental divide between the two cultures, beginning in the food they eat and the language they speak. For her, Caribbeans are ‘a different shade of black’ – an attitude shared by Natasha’s father Malcolm (Wil Johnson), only the other way round. For him, Nigerians are sneaks, peasants, and perpetrators of black magic. Ironically, it is in the rejection of the other, in the prejudices and the unwillingness to get to know one another, that the two families come closest together. Kemi even refuses to meet Natasha, while Malcolm only admits David into his house to provoke and embarrass him. The love between David and Natasha is strong – they see in each other a mirror of their own independence and strength, of their severed ties with the shackles of tradition. But is it strong enough to survive this opposition, or will the play end like Romeo and Juliet?

The play’s ending, which I do not want to give away here, is it’s most interesting part, and makes the audience leave as they should (at least according to Brecht…): thinking. David, who is extremely bright and shows artistic talent, has painted a picture he calls ‘Does love have a colour’? Oguns is able to elaborate on this question on the emotional scale as well as with regard to the questions of skin colour.

Director Raz Shaw stages the play in the round, and has the off-stage actors wait behind a thin gauze screen where they remain visible. It is as if a council of silent, removed, and pitiless judges is deciding over the poor humans in the arena of life. On the stage itself, distance and divide structure the spatial plan. Natasha and David repeatedly talk to each other from two opposed ends at the outer rim of the circle. The message is clear – so clear that it does not need to be repeated: the two lovers are separated by a chasm of prejudices. Otherwise, the staging is minimalist but essentially realistic. However, since the plot is so well known, a degree of boldness in the aesthetic concept could have enhanced the impact of the production.

Due to this lack of rigour, the story enfolds entertainingly but without a great deal of thought provocation. The actors deliver a vivid and energetic portrayal of their characters that come alive through a heightened sense of their respective cultural distinctions, particularly in terms of accent. But isn’t this only strengthening the exact same prejudices the play is criticizing? Could the director perhaps have fallen prey to what Edward Said termed ‘Orientalism’? Shaw constructs his production on the entertaining otherness in language and physicality of both the Nigerian and the Caribbean cultures. Hence, this performance of Torn does not realise the play’s controversial potential, but remains ‘a good night out’.