The lights go up on PlayFight in the Pleasance Downstairs Theatre and Kai watches over the audience, godlike in his white puffer coat and fresh creps. After a moment of violence, we learn that Kai is dead and TJ is dying.
Playwright Christina Alagaratnam traces the tragedy backwards. Like Romeo and Juliet, PlayFight pieces together a coming-of-age story that ends with this devasting beginning.
Kai, TJ and Zara are inseparable school friends, navigating childhoods in South London, bouncing between chicken shops and classrooms. They rapidly win the audience over with their collective charm and infectious chemistry.
We soon get a sense of the racialised pressure they face at school, from out-of-proportion tellings off, to teachers who give white students better grades for the same work. We’re rooting for them when TJ, played with skilful warmth by Landry Adelard, tells Kai he wants to grow up and move somewhere safe and warm and buy his mum a nice yard.
But these boys will not get to live their dreams, as Kai tells us “The ends are designed to keep us here so we can never make it out, not alive anyway.”
The childhood trio unravels after a school fight. When Zara (Carla Garratt) confides in the headteacher, the different paths that the boys take define their futures, as adulthood forces itself in. The school system does not serve TJ or Kai and one punishing moment ends up determining the rest of their lives. The play centres the racialised adultification of Black children and its tragic consequences.
Iain Gordon’s Kai has an impressive transformation in the second half, but Carla Garratt’s Zara left me asking questions. One scuffle leads her to the headteacher and her motive is explained too late and too little. Perhaps this is the point, though, as PlayFight shows us the disproportionate punishment that Black boys in British schools so often receive.
Design by Eliandro Monteiro and sound from Kieron Morris help keep the stakes high and Leian John-Baptiste’s direction never loses pace.
From families forced to grieve their young sons, to men who only learn to cry when they lose a friend, PlayFight shows the rarely-confronted connectivity between racism, gang crime, and the crisis in male mental health. It is a powerful portrayal of a broken system that demands change.
PlayFight is at The Pleasance until 3rd June.
