Cambridge Theatre is a vibrant hub of performing, singing and dancing with a various vary of genres from tragedy to comedy, melodrama to musical theatre. That being mentioned, it’s not unusual to see the identical circles of acquainted faces gracing the phases on the ADC Theatre and Corpus Playroom. It makes you marvel if Cambridge Theatre is really various in each sense of the phrase.
It would clarify why, regardless of all the variability on show, I used to be shocked to listen to about ‘My Fact’, a brand new present coming to the Corpus Playroom this week, which centres round rap music in West London.
I sat down with the present’s author and director, Eyoel Abebaw-Mesfin, and producer, Aliyah Irabor York, to listen to how ‘My Fact’ is pushing extra higher illustration on the Cambridge stage.
Eyoel Abebaw-Mesfin throughout rehearsals at Corpus Playroom [Image Credits: Christine Obijiaku]
The Story Behind My Fact
Eyoel first started by explaining the premise behind the play. “My Fact is centred round Sophia, a younger lady that lives in London.” Sophia has a ardour for rap however a falling out along with her finest good friend, Annissa, turns right into a heated postcode battle. With loyalties to households who “establish themselves by the place they’re from in West London,” ‘My Fact’ is an exploration of those cultural clashes, lies and, in fact, fact.
Digging somewhat deeper, I discover that the title of the play is critical on many ranges. “It’s multi-layered,” Eyoel tells me. It’s a narrative that started as his fact, he says, “as a result of I’m from West London.” However Aliyah believes that “it’s deeper than simply the characters.” It’s additionally the reality of “everybody that’s part of this play.” With a very BME solid and crew, ‘My Fact’ has assembled to inform a narrative that everybody concerned “can relate to.” Eyoel maintains that “in some methods, it’s their fact too.”
The Actuality of Illustration
A present with the idea of ‘fact’ at its core appears becoming for the theatre. Though actors onstage are given the prospect to change into somebody they’re not, theatre as an artform can also be a method to symbolize points of ourselves which might be true to life.
‘My Fact’ has all the time been a present acutely aware of its interactions with actuality, ranging from its principal character, Sophia, who is predicated on Eyoel’s youthful sister. Eyoel describes his writing course of wherein he wished to make Sophia’s character “as sensible and as relatable as attainable.” “As a lot as my sister pertains to Sophia, different individuals relate to Sophia,” he provides.
This sense of relatability goes even additional as Eyoel reveals all of the characters have been “created with individuals in thoughts.” The characters of Nati and Sammy, he explains, have been created with “youthful and older variations of me in thoughts.” The mom was “primarily based on my mom”, Mr Edwards on “a trainer I had.” Even Boy One and Boy Two have been primarily based “on all of the mandem I’ve bought.”
[Image Credits: Christine Obijiaku]
Shaping each one of many characters, the present works to symbolize actual individuals. Not solely does it give actors from minority backgrounds a spot onstage, it additionally represents one thing of the reality of their lives and of the lives of these they know personally.
For Eyoel, ‘My Fact’ represents not solely whoever he had in thoughts, however that “all of the members of the solid, crew and viewers keep in mind,” each particular person regarding the story barely in another way.
What does this imply for Cambridge Theatre?
Surprisingly, Eyoel reveals that when he first began writing, he didn’t have the intention of seeing the play carried out. Seeing it come to life, nonetheless, marks a “transition in the place Cambridge Theatre goes.”
When requested about his first impression of theatre within the metropolis, Eyoel replies that “theatre right here [was] Cambridge Theatre – very, very Cambridge Theatre.” In clarifying what he meant, Eyoel leads with one phrase: “Caucasian.”
He admits to considering that Cambridge Theatre was “gonna be a whole lot of white individuals telling white tales, outdated tales.” Unsurprisingly, these “outdated, white tales” have been synonymous with “Shakespeare.”
Types of storytelling
Though he has “huge respect” for the Bard, Eyoel jogs my memory that Shakespeare is “only a story.” The factor that Shakespeare and ‘My Fact’ have in frequent is a “tapping into the identical framework, the identical starting, center and finish, the identical feelings and tensions”. He asserts that his play is “only a telling otherwise.”
And that is the place rap music is available in. Eyoel describes Shakespeare as an “summary manner of telling easy issues.” He believes rap behaves in the identical manner – “In case you take a look at anybody rapping, what they’re saying could be very easy, the way in which they’re saying is creative and inventive, and it sounds engaging.”
It’s rap music, and never Shakespeare, that’s intrinsic to the tradition that Eyoel identifies with. “After we have been at highschool, we’d be barring to one another, rapping to one another. We’re rapping, making poems. That’s simply how our tradition works in order that’s what I wished the play to do.”
Making a House for Themselves
The defining high quality of ‘My Fact’, in response to Aliyah, is that “it’s unapologetically itself. It’s referred to as ‘My Fact’ for a cause. It’s lovely as a result of it’s the fact of lots of people’s personal experiences and on a regular basis actuality.”
Aliyah tells me that for lots of the solid and manufacturing workforce, it’s their first time getting concerned in a Cambridge present. Lots of them had proven an curiosity in theatre however “they simply didn’t really feel like they may present that throughout the Cambridge Theatre house.”
Eyoel believes there are “creatives who don’t even know they’re creatives due to the house they’re in.”
[Image Credits: Christine Obijiaku]
He describes how he inspired a whole lot of “his boys” to audition for the present, though many, as first-time actors, have been initially “hesitant to be concerned… however I mentioned [to them], I’m supplying you with a personality which you’ll simply be your self with.”
Now the complete solid are “rapping onstage, making individuals snigger onstage”. They’re “proudly owning it,” says Eyoel. “Who is aware of what they’re going to do after this.”
Eyoel describes the complete course of as “therapeutic… I look again and I see satisfaction. I really feel a whole lot of satisfaction.”
Aliyah asserts that her favorite factor about ‘My Fact’ is “the individuals,” admitting that “there’s by no means a single rehearsal the place we’re not dying of laughter.” The present is “a creation of every part we wish to expertise for ourselves.”
What can audiences count on from My Fact?
“Vibes,” says Eyoel, urging viewers members to not miss “Nati’s rap.”
“In case you’re black and from ends, there’s one thing you possibly can resonate with” and in case you’re not, each Aliyah and Eyoel consider “there’s one thing you possibly can be taught and take away and admire.”
‘My Fact’ takes “to thine personal self be true” to the streets of West London in a showcasing of rap and black tradition like by no means seen earlier than on a Cambridge stage, defiantly representing and telling the respective truths of all which might be concerned. The present, “unapologetically itself,” calls us to query who Cambridge Theatre is for, who it represents and the way we will higher inform everybody’s story.
‘My Fact’ is enjoying on the Corpus Playroom till Saturday twenty sixth November.
Function Picture Credit: Christine Obijiaku
