‘Blood and Gold’ is a performance of multiple stories, all threaded together with incredible skill into a single sparkling tapestry. It’s about the complex legacy of colonialism in Scotland and how racism persists in its past and present, drawing on creator Mara Menzies’s shared Scottish and Kenyan heritage. First performed in the Fringe in 2019, its 2022 return has a renewed power after the worldwide resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement – but its message is crucial and enduring.
Menzies’s storytelling is enchanting. Loaded with mythical imagery, it feels fabled but contemporary, as though it has been passed down through generations. She moves like a ballet dancer and speaks like a poet, the whole monologue aching with a magical radiance despite its challenging subject matter. There are moments of joy, when her eyes glitter with innocence. There are breaks of humour, when she opens up the story to the audience and gets them to join her in dance or call out suggestions, weaving us all into the fable.
But there’s a darkness that’s constantly lurking. The lights start to dim and a creepy, cracking sound surfaces (brilliant sound design by Dave House). Menzies’s body twists and turns, her eyes suddenly possessed by the ‘shadow man’. A reappearing character who’s watching from afar, he interrupts to cause chaos or whisper insecurities into ears, encouraging characters to strip away their Blackness (‘your hair is a mess, it would be better off straight’) and become invisible.
The shadow is a metaphor for colonialism, slavery, racism and white manipulation: it is the omnipresent evil that stifles Black voices and their freedom. And even when time passes and things look like they could be getting brighter, the shadow somehow worms his way in. At the climax, our heroine sneaks out of the shadow’s clutches and runs towards the light, almost escaping. There’s an illusion of hope. But at the last minute, the shadow suffocates her and she gasps a haunting echo of George Floyd’s final words.
It’s disturbing to watch. But Menzies ends on a hopeful note: the final heroine crushes the shadow man, piercing him with her late mother’s stories, history, and African heritage. For Menzies, language is both the attack and the defence. She reminds us of the power of words to twist, suppress, and liberate – and about the necessity to both speak up and to listen. Compellingly written and beautifully told, ‘Blood and Gold’ feels like a modern-day fairytale.
