By: Rebecca Stanton
A few weekends ago, I saw a stage-adaptation of my A-level text, Samuel Selvon’s ‘The Lonely Londoners’ at the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn.
In the course of my A level this book became one of my favourites. I remember revising and crying over Selvon’s stunning final passages. Despite the looming fears of exams and the pressing need to have a well-rounded quote bank, I truly felt I had connected with this text on a level I had never experienced before.
The novel is about the experiences of the Wind-Rush generation in 1950s London, told through a series of tragi-comic vignettes that centre on its vibrant and surreal characters. Written in non-standard, creolised English, its themes are expertly realised: community, nostalgia, identity, marginalisation. Selvon has mastered the artistic form of the novel so, as someone whose favourite artistic medium is theatre, when I heard it was onstage I had to go.
Overall, it was a solid production. The acting was compelling, integrating naturalism with physical theatre to transform the minimalistic stage into the bustling streets and dingy backrooms of London. I loved the increased presence of female characters, who largely take a backseat in the novel, which further brought out the themes of sexuality and gender without shying away from the darker sides of the protagonist’s behaviour.
My criticisms lie, perhaps stuffily, in some of its inauthenticity to the text. As a stage adaption I understand the need to chop and change, but some of the best moments featured direct textual quotations which the production surprisingly lacked.
The adaptation also dramatically cut the novel’s wide cast of characters to centre on just Moses, Galahad, Big City, Lewis, Agnes, Tanty and an invented Trinidadian love-interest for Moses. As a production embracing physical theatre, and capable of using it very well, this felt unneeded, especially considering how distinct the other characters are such as: Cap the mysterious, womanizing drop out ; Harrison, who acts middle-class ‘ladeda’ ; and Bart who denies his blackness. Multi-rolling some of these other parts would really illuminate the contrasts Selvon creates in the novel, juxtaposing his distinctive characters with the looming phantom of their isolated anonymity in a city that stereotypes and rejects them.
The production further altered the novel’s vignette-based plotline, originally centred on Moses’s experiences and storytelling, to evenly weigh on each character. To fulfil this, a lot of liberties were taken with the text which amplified sub-stories of gun violence, knife crime, and alcoholism. These were visually emphasised by the presence of a knife, gun and hip flask in glowing red boxes set into the stage’s back wall. Though this new focus brought out the frustration and heartbreak of the male protagonists, it felt like a generalisation of the deep complexities at the heart of the novel, bringing physical violence into a story where psychological violence or the covert racism of the ‘Old English Diplomacy’ is a much more prominent theme.
The production further strayed away from the psychological nuances of the novel by incorporating a female love interest for Moses, left behind in Trinidad. Her role in the show mirrored the role of nostalgia in the novel, arguably Moses’s key source of internalised conflict. In the novel, rather than a dramatic story of abandoning his lover, Moses’s internal conflict is a denial of the truth: that his nostalgic ideal of Trinidad is self-deceptive. This change in character motivation detracted from Selvon’s incredibly nuanced approach to the migrant experience and the universal struggles of memory and belonging.
However, one moment in the production stood out to me as perfectly encapsulating the novel’s main theme. It was a movement sequence performed by the men where one of them would begin to fall , almost reaching the ground, before the others would pull him up, stopping him from hitting the floor. It was physical-theatre at its finest, a perfect stage translation of the relationship between the men in the novel: a home from home, a deep support network beyond that of mere friendship.
As you would expect, reading the novel and watching the play of Selvon’s ‘The Lonely Londoners’ are very different experiences but I thoroughly recommend both! It was an amazing evening seeing one of my favourite pieces of literature celebrated on stage.
