Black Superhero: a witty debut in which storytelling loses out to ideology
In his very witty debut play Black Superhero, Danny Lee Wynter portrays David who, early in the play, says “I had a dream once of playing Hamlet. Next week I’m auditioning for Horatio.”
In many ways, that line is the crux of the play. David feels he is an also-ran actor in comparison with his friends – Raheem (Eloka Ivo) has had some modest success on screen, but it’s King (Dyllón Burnside), who plays Marvel-style superhero Craw, whose career has gone supernova. Unlike them, David doesn’t feel masculine enough because he doesn’t have muscles the “size of a horse’s withers”.
Meanwhile, David has a seemingly unrequited crush on King and works for his younger sister Syd (Rochenda Sandall in acerbic show-stealing form) as a kids’ entertainer. There are also hints that David’s childhood was blighted by a violently domineering father, with resultant “daddy issues” affecting his romantic and sexual attachments in the present.
In addition, a drug-addicted past and recent suicide attempt means that David is receiving ongoing treatment from a therapist who resembles “Tilda Swinton in The Beach”. When David finds out that King is in an open marriage and fancies him too, it sends David into a spiralling devolution of self-esteem and sobriety that manifests in David’s febrile imagination as his superhero alter ego melding with his hero-worship of King. Ultimately, what David wants is to be rescued.
This central idea is complicated by themes circling white liberal virtue signalling, celebrity, black queer representation, positive discrimination, queerbaiting, the pressure on successful black people to be public role models and the tendency for white people to be titillated by black victim stories.
If that seems like a lot of freight for one small play to ferry, it’s beautifully but only partially counterbalanced by Wynter’s theatrical superpowers: his ear for dialogue, deft characterisation of black queerness in myriad permutations and rapier-sharp wit. In combination with the accomplished cast who make Wynter’s dialogue sound very natural, his dissections of popular culture land squarely on the very funny cutting edge of the zeitgeist.
The trouble is all that freight also means that the play asks many more questions than it has the scope to adequately address in its 140-minute (including interval) duration. As enjoyable as the wisecracking agenda-setting is, it doesn’t add up to a coherent character arc or satisfying plot resolution in the second half. Early in the play, Raheem questions if ideology makes for good art. The same question could be addressed to Wynter because, at its conclusion, the play’s attempt to address the dearth of black queerness on stage felt more like a vehicle for ideology than truly accomplished storytelling. Nevertheless, I’m excited to see what Wynter does next.
Until April 29; royalcourttheatre.com
