Alone on a stage, a young black man grows up before our eyes. He’s a working class kid from Tottenham, and he’s here to tell us the story of his life and his neighbourhood. As a little boy, his recollections are sunny and hopeful – canny, insightful, but viewed through his eyes with a sheen of innocence: his own. If he’s good, his mother is going to give him a bike. If you’re good in life, therefore, good things will come to you.
But the world doesn’t work that way, especially for black and brown kids whose families have been doing it tough. There are forces bigger than individual goodness – systemic, racist forces – that can keep a good kid down.
And those forces really try to keep the boy and his world down. As the world shapes the boy, he begins to reshape his life. Goodness and compliance in the face of oppression seems less and less like a good idea.
Good Dog is a mountain of a one-hander, running for more than two hours without interval. Rising star Justin Amankwah has to climb the incline alone, and it’s steep. As he goes farther, the air gets thinner and the risk of dark times gets higher. It’s tense. Amankwah stares down the task with admirable resolve; he carries the weight of this world on his shoulders, breathing life into the characters that make up his neighbourhood. There’s Gandhi, who runs the corner shop; the smoking boys and ‘what-what’ girls that terrorise the weaker residents and shoplift from the shop. There’s the boy’s bully, Desmond, and the girl he likes, Jamilla, and there’s the boy’s mother, who is carrying of a world of problems herself. Amankwah juggles them all as best he can, and for the most part, the result is vivid.
Written by British playwright Arinzé Kene, the script is sharp and rich, with a built-in twist of sorts that, late in the piece, changes the game. Director Rachel Chant holds the work carefully in her hands, and she and Amankwah have taken great care to tell this story with love.
But it’s a big piece, hard to contain in the intimate playing space of the Kings Cross Theatre. Sometimes this production spins out and is a little too ungainly to stay soaring, a little too long in the tiny space – your attention might wane. But Amankwah can generally win you back; his swift transitions from moment to moment, mood to mood, grab at your attention, and his instincts are strong, his presence undeniable. It might feel more like a winding road than a straight line, but it’s a welcome journey all the same.