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Kayode is stuck. He can't get a job, so he's literally wallowing in misery in a shallow pool in the centre of the stage, at the busy feet of his wife Kikipoe (who's happily employed in ‘digital’). Director Taio Lawson and playwright Dipo Baruwa-Etti fill ‘An Unfinished Man’ with arresting, vivid images like this. But Baruwa-Etti’s play also manages something seriously impressive. It's rich in metaphors and ambiguities, while also being chest-tighteningly specific about what it's like to feel that your life never got started.
The answer to Kayode's prayers comes through an unexpected channel. A charismatic preacher convinces Kayode he’s been cursed, and persuades him to undertake a terrifying-sounding cure: 72 hours without food or water, only prayer and soul-searching for sustenance. No-nonsense Kikiope is unconvinced. But Kayode’s mother is on board, blaming herself for a curse that she thinks was administered when he was a baby in Nigeria.
Soon, Kayode (Fode Simbo) is literally wrestling with his demon, Itan (Selina Jones). Jones has a physicality that’s mesmerising to watch. Her fingers wave like seaweed or transform into claws that interlace with Kayode's own shaking hands, as they speak in a cryptic language of their own. ‘I am history’, she tells him, becoming an ancient, pagan force of resistance against the Christian morality of Kayode’s family, and against the capitalist London society that tells him he must be productive to have worth. As Kayode’s preacher debates his fate, Itan gently tends yellow flowers, aligning herself to a more natural way of being. Rosie Elnile's design does so much to create the dream-like, ambiguous world of the play: its saturated colours and lush textures transform the stage into Lynchian space for rituals and mysteries.
It’s a real strength of Baruwa-Etti’s play that it shows demons to be both real and unreal, good and evil, all at once. He doesn’t shy away from the real world, structural causes of Kayode’s problems, but he depicts them with a lightness that makes them just one strand in a complex net of psychological difficulties that are keeping Kayode down. What could feel cliched or overwrought becomes as fresh and strange as the yellow bouquets that fill the stage, synthetic and heady all at once.