Black And White Minstrels

Theatre: Review - Realism at Soho Theatre

THERE is a clock-watching test in the theatre and Anthony Neilson’s mad, charming and completely bonkers play passes it with flying colours – the 80 minutes trundles along with joyous alacrity.

Realism is about time, or rather the wasting of it, as well as loss and disappointment. 

Tim finds himself in stomach-spreading middle age living alone with his cat, who hates him, and spending the whole day holed up in doors waiting for his ex-girlfriend to call.

We are treated, therefore, to his rambling subconscious musings, from mastabatory fantasies interrupted by his mother entering the scene, to the Black and White Minstrels performing a song he has just made up, and, of course, his own funeral.

Friends pop up out of television sets, his mother nags him from inside the washing machine and the cat calls him a “prick” while every now and again a thin column of sand falls, egg timer like, from the ceiling.

Realism was first performed in Edinburgh in 2006 and it has taken five years for it to be staged in England for the first time – this is the play’s debut this side of the border. It is surprising. Neilson is one of the most inventive writers in British theatre, and yet outside of the theatre community has a low profile. His theatrical philosophy is that the audience should be treated to an event or story that couldn’t be done just as well – or better – on film or television.

Hence the exuberant, surreal and cheerful nature of Realism, which manages to be cartoon-like and thoughtful at the same time.

A lot of critics muse on how theatre audiences are growing older. It’s because there aren’t enough plays like this, or enough writers like Neilson.

Defeating the Black and White Minstrels - Liberal England

The Black and White Minstrels get a bad press these days. As they launched Mr Lenny Henry upon an unsuspecting and, in large part, innocent world, I suppose they rather deserve it. (Mind you, Henry went on to marry the comedy duo French & Saunders, so deserves our sympathy more than our condemnation.) However, I must record that the Minstrels were mustard keen cricketers and that my XI’s fixture against them was the highlight of many a summer. The details of those games have rather faded into the mist, but I do recall one of the TV Toppers taking a good running catch to dismiss Wallace Lawler when he seemed well set. I am sorry to report that our relations soured in 1969 when, let down at the last minute by the touring West Indians, I prevailed upon the Minstrels to play in their stead. The crowd saw through this ruse distressingly quickly and I was obliged to return all of the gate money to placate them. Had the Minstrels not still insisted upon receiving their match fee, I should probably not have written my ground-breaking and influential article on racism in popular entertainment for the Manchester Guardian that autumn.

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Souvenir album, black & white minstrels, vol.2 (songbook).

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