White, the first part of Koko Brown’s “colour” trilogy, was about growing up with mixed heritage in London. Blending spoken word with live looping, it was deeply personal gig-theatre in which Brown refused to pick a side while discussing her part-Jamaican, part-Irish identity.
In the second instalment, Grey, she does come down on a side, while dramatising the racial politics of mental health. “350 million people suffer from depression. Only a third of these get help. If you are a black person you have the same chance of depression but significantly less of these will get help,” Brown says.
It is urgent, woefully underreported subject matter and this production dramatises factors ranging from daily casual prejudice to the numbing effects of medication and the pernicious stereotype of the “strong, independent black woman” that leads to a failure of diagnosis.
But there is a double discrimination at play here, seen in both the judgments of those outside the black community and those within it: “Depression. That’s a very white, middle-class problem. You’d feel better if you went to church.”
Much of the play is set to music – choral, rap, R&B – and different scenarios and aspects of depression are evoked song by song – often with changes in tone from humour to vulnerability, anger and despair. The most emotionally baring moments come a capella, when Brown elongates notes to sound, painfully, like sonorous screams. Martha Godfrey’s disco lights glint with paradoxical joy against the darkness of Brown’s words.
British Sign Language becomes a poetic part of the performance too, as Brown’s words are signed by Sapphire Joy. Sometimes the relationship is inverted, as Joy signs on stage with great physical expressiveness, and there is little or no direct translation into spoken word.
There is comedy between the women as well, who are equally charismatic performers, but the moments of tension between them work less well and appear underdeveloped.
The humour, though, is brilliant, dark and sharp. One recurring skit comes in the form of a children’s television show describing depression; other scenes capture the forced denial and fake smiles that sufferers of depression adopt to make it more palatable for society. Scenes in which Brown sings her response to the facile advice of others are some of the strongest for their barbed comedy: “Yes, I have been drinking water … Should I try a face mask? I will totally try that.”
There is power in it all, though the overall shape of the narrative is segmented, impressionistic and skit-like. Then again, perhaps the repetition, ellipses and incohesion reflect the experience of depression.
