[title]
‘This is all just a big metaphysical fuck-up,’ complains Annie (Imogen Doel) after she wakes up one morning to discover that she is Kanye West.
That is quite the conceit, and it’s probably worth saying that much of the appeal of rising star Sam Steiner’s ‘Kanye the First’ really is as a sort of fish-out-of-water goofball caper about an awkward, twentysomething white girl who suddenly discovers she’s the biggest black star on the planet. And as it turns out, it ain’t easy being Yeezy.
Fortunately Steiner has not in fact written a bad-taste race relations comedy, nor a voguish rewrite of ‘Metamorphosis’, but rather a dizzyingly – sometimes maddeningly – self-aware drama about identity, empathy, privilege, celebrity and authenticity.
Drab, well-meaning Annie has always dreamed of being somebody else: in the first scene she goes on a date with Adam (Daniel Francis-Swaby) and insists on role-playing the part of a more exotic woman he fancies more; throughout the play she gives childish, shifting explanations (astronaut, spy) for what her absent father does for a living.
Annie, her ill mother (Caroline Faber) and smart, successful sister Eve (Keziah Joseph), are horrified when she wakes up and simply is Kanye West, who she’s not even a fan of. A lot of other people are fans, though. And as the story wears on Annie – played with total conviction by Doel – becomes increasingly intoxicated/unhinged by the reaction she inspires as the second coming of Yeezus (whose death is reported early on).
There are a vast number of ideas chucked at the wall in Andrew Twyman’s enjoyably frenetic production, staged in pop-up theatre The Mix as part of the London debut of writing festival HighTide. Indeed, there are too many ideas to really talk about without making ‘Kanye the First’ sound like some hyper-academic slog, which it isn’t.
Much as Steiner relentlessly questions Annie’s right to literally appropriate a black man, so the play continually interrogates its own purpose. The production constantly points to its own artificiality via pointedly non-naturalistic casting, Annie’s increasing inability to distinguish the roles her doubled-up co-stars are playing (Jospeh, for instance, plays both Eve and – yes – Kim), and constant references to an imaginary PhD paper called ‘the inherent violence of narrative form’.
It is an audacious and amusing play about identity and cultural appropriation that is constantly dissecting its right to be an audacious and amusing play about identity and cultural appropriation. Which is well and good but it feels a little bit inhibited by its need to ironically undercut itself, and as a result it shies clear of saying anything particularly profound – other than, perhaps, the fact its writer is a very clever young man, a veritable Sir Tom Stoppard in waiting.