Boi Boi Is Dead, but his spirit still walks the Earth, observing the effects of his demise on those closest to him and playing the trumpet melodies that earned him fame for a while (cool-with-bite Afro-jazz, composed by Michael Henry). The setting is urban Zimbabwe – huge African spaces stretched across the stage by Emma Chapman’s sunlight-and-dust lighting. Francisco Rodriguez-Weil’s cutouts tumble rooftop skylines and cleverly play with scale to exaggerate impressions of expanse beyond the immediate. Funeral concluded, Boi Boi’s mother returns to her village; his brother Ezra lingers, to the annoyance of Boi Boi’s long-term lover. Miriam wishes Ezra would fly back to his adopted English ho
Leeds-based, Zimbabwe-born young playwright Zodwa Nyoni’s first full-length play is a triumph. At the opening night in the Courtyard Theatre the audience was hugely supportive and Nyoni deserved the extended applause at the end of what is a very assured and mature debut exploring the dynamics of a complex family set-up in Zimbabwe. Miriam is lover to (recently deceased) charismatic jazz musician Boi Boi, mother to son Petu (the product of a previous relationship) and surrogate mother to Una since the girl’s mother Stella left 12 years earlier when she was a small child. Now that Boi Boi is dead, estranged wife Stella returns with her own agenda along with Boi Boi’s older brother Ezra, who
Developed after a year-long Channel 4 writer’s residency at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Zodwa Nyoni’s first full-length play opens the new season here with a compelling story of cultural collision that also deals with the intergenerational interplay between parental ties and youthful aspiration. It is a freshly minted statement from this Leeds-based writer, who skilfully interconnects universal themes with her Zimbabwean heritage, framed through vibrant characters and a plot centred on the funeral of a successful Afro-jazz trumpeter: Boi Boi may have joined a jam session in the sky, but his legacy is a discordant family where too much bad blood is buried, leaving the female characters to dig u
The most powerful weapon in a wannabe playwright’s arsenal? Lists, and lots of them, writes Zodwa Nyoni When I started writing for theatre in 2010 I was coming at it from a poetry background. Five years earlier, aged 16, I joined Leeds Young Authors, a community-based poetry organisation, and over the following years I performed and competed nationally and internationally in poetry slams. I had poems published and took part in various projects and productions.....Read more on The Guardian
The design of this first full length play, Boi Boi is Dead by Zodwa Nyoni, is the clue to grasping its unusual and delicate dramatic logic; at once full of realism and yet carefully sketched in a series of episodes, tableaux even, each building towards the emotional heart cry that concludes the play. Francisco Rodriguez-Weil sets the play against a vibrant sky – as though an engraving, a silhouette of shapes – both those made by the actors (beautifully directed by Lucian Msamati) and those made by large hanging cut-outs that signpost ingredients of the ‘everyday’, while suggesting a milieu of myth and African folk-lore. Shaped model houses are in fact boxes that hide the artefacts that will