Tambo & Bones
This review is from 2023. Tambo & Bones returns to Stratford East for 2025 as part of a UK tour. Clifford Samuel takes over the role of Tambo, and Daniel Ward reprises the role of Bones.
US poet and playwright Dave Harris’s ‘Tambo & Bones’ is a funny, filthy, often gleefully ridiculous satire about the African American male experience as embodied by the two title characters: Tambo (Rhashan Stone), a thoughtful, troubled guy concerned with the betterment of Black America and the expansion of its consciousness; and Bones (Daniel Ward), an incorrigible hustler almost entirely fixated on how much money he can make out of any given situation.
When we first meet them, they’re dressed in battered, silly minstrel outfits, stuck in an overtly artificial, cartoonish-looking field. Tambo is trying to have a nap. Bones wants to get some money out of us, the audience. They bicker and debate and come up with various harebrained schemes before realising something is off and that they need a more contemporary way of telling their story/making a shitload of money. In the next scene, they’re reborn as an old-school rap duo, now espousing their worldviews in rhyme.
Rude and ridiculous and anchored by two full-bodied performances from Stone and Ward – who absolutely go for it with the rapping –‘Tambo and Bones’ is a blast. Yes, it’s also a consideration of African American male archetypes and the Black American dream. But it’s a very irreverent one, something underscored by a totally...