Public enemy

Arinzé Kene’s play Misty is a collection of rap numbers and skits about a fare dodger, Lucas, from Hackney. Lucas (played by Kene) gets into a scuffle on a bus and is later arrested for entering London Zoo without a ticket. That’s the entire narrative. Obviously, Kene can’t create an evening’s entertainment from such meagre pickings, so he turns his tribulations as a dramatist into the show’s second storyline.

Playwrights moaning about writing plays is a theme of scant interest to audiences, but Kene enlists our sympathy by examining his quest to write a drama that satisfies both black people and the playgoing bourgeoisie. His friends predict that Lucas’s story will end up as a ‘nigger play’, or an example of ‘urban jungle safari shit’. Kene dramatises the problem of stereotyping as follows. A female friend lectures him about Hollywood’s false portrayal of black people as violent. Then she tells Kene that she’ll burn down the theatre if she dislikes the play about Lucas. Then she says that she was joking. (Everyone in the theatre laughed.) Then she says that she wasn’t joking and that she will burn down the theatre. (Everyone laughed again, but less warmly.) I’m not sure if this is the best way to dissociate black people from violence.

Kene examines the sorrows of Lucas further. He’s a thief who steals from his own family and he hates white yuppies, or ‘viruses’ as he calls them, whose gentrification of Hackney has caused rents to rise. He visits a hipster café which, he claims, occupies the site of a dismantled children’s playground. As he takes his seat he’s scolded by the staff for pronouncing ‘café’ without its second syllable (would that ever happen?) and after complaining that the menu is overcomplicated he threatens to kneecap the waiter.