Everyone knew there was more to the late Chadwick Boseman than Black Panther, but even so it was somewhat startling when Deep Azure – a play he wrote in 2005 – popped up on the winter programming schedule of Shakespeare’s Globe.
Boseman’s playwriting career fell by the wayside as his acting one took off, and from recent interviews with his widow Taylor Simone Ledward – who had tragically little time with him before his death from cancer – it’s apparent that she wasn’t especially familiar with this work until the Globe asked to stage it. And why would she be? Deep Azure was, relatively speaking, his most successful play, but it only received one staging in Chicago. There is undeniably something random about how by far its biggest production to date is at a candlelit Jacobean playhouse in London, 21 years on.
Actually, though, the fit with the Globe makes sense beyond being a show that director Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu was keen to stage. Boseman’s play is not only written in street poetry-esque rhyming verse, but it features a ghost (kind of), a revenge plot and even actually quoted passages from Hamlet.
Like Hamlet, it’s set in the aftermath of a death, that of Deep (Jayden Elijah), the free-spirited lover to Selina Jones’ intense Azure. He was killed by a cop, and she’s now stuck in a spiral of despair, compounded by her own underlying body image issues. She lives with Deep’s friends Tone (Elijah Cook) and Roshad (Justice Ritchie) because she doesn’t trust herself to go home in this state. Deep still appears: perhaps a spirit, perhaps a memory, perhaps a grief – and guilt – induced halluciation.
Inspired by a true story, Boseman’s bleakly poetic but playful exploration of grief is devastating at its best but I found the first half a bit of a chore. Aside from the fact nothing much happens for a long while – it’s very inward – I’d say Fynn-Aiduenu’s production can feel over-resourced, with a brightly-clad chorus of a capella singers drenching everything in arch song (at one point the Cheers theme is bust out) that pushes it towards needlessly Shakespearean length. In the second half the chorus disperses and it’s all the better for it, as the plot kicks into explosive gear and Boseman’s potent poetry is allowed to stand on its own rather than being swaddled in artifice.
I’m not actually clear to what extent Fynn-Aiduenu is just fulfilling the vision of Boseman’s text and I’m sure some people will love the chorus. It’s obviously great that the Globe is spending money on a show that is more of a risk than ‘some Shakespeare’. But I’m not convinced Deep Azure gains from such a maximalist approach, when really it’s about its four main characters, particularly Jones’s Azure, superb as a woman who has hit absolute rock bottom now trying to forge a way forward. Still, Deep Azure is far more than a curio by a famous guy – it’s a work of powerful, if occasionally meandering poetry, and if we probably have Black Panther to thank for the fact that it’s been dusted off 21 years on, then that’s why he’s a superhero, I guess.
