Living and working in London, one becomes rather desensitised to seeing graffiti around. Getting to the Vault Festival each year, for instance, requires passing through a ‘graffiti tunnel’, where people come and are not only permitted but encouraged to spray graffiti designs on the walls. I’ve never paid attention to what’s written, breezing past to get to a show – for those who wish to stand and stare, there is, I should imagine, some beauty to found in such art. The artists can take their time and spray to their hearts’ content during whatever hours are reasonable for them.
In Shadow Kingdoms, however, there is a thrill that comes from spraying Tube trains in the small hours of the morning when they are not in passenger service. As I say, perhaps people like me have seen it all before; when I was growing up, Tube trains would either be grey on the outside or multicoloured if they had been coated with graffiti. Here, Sketchpad, a name granted to a schoolboy (Jorden Myrie) by Mute (Katie Warren) – itself, it almost goes without saying, a nickname – is keen to learn from Mute, apparently an established graffiti artist, how to express creativity through ‘graffing’, a term defined in the Urban Dictionary thus: “The ART of graffitiing, not randomly scrawling your name or nickname on a wall”.
Graffiti does, of course, have its negative connotations. I don’t know how much Transport for London spends on removing it from bus shelters and railway stations, for instance, and there have been instances of grossly offensive graffiti appearing. I am also reminded of the story of a graffiti artist who, after a community project had painted over his artwork, worked to re-graff the wall. His girlfriend was unhappy with the result and he found himself, on her orders, repainting the wall in the off-white colour the community project had used previously.
It was rather difficult to fully engage with the storyline. There are too many instances of either party calling an end or threatening to call an end to their friendship that it is become difficult to believe anything either says, when somehow the friendship continues. The terminology was rather lost on me (this production ought to have a glossary in the programme), though some choreographed movement to accompany some of the terms was somewhat helpful.
Neither character is particularly likeable – Mute is generally rather abrasive, while Sketchpad tended to speak his thoughts out loud, which sometimes meant both Mute and the audience were subjected to rather random topics of discussion. I couldn’t reconcile, for instance, Sketchpad’s talk of chocolate bourbons and ninjas with anything remotely relevant to their plans to graff all over London. Sketchpad’s predilection to ramble on started to get quite tiresome, though I note there were some in the audience at the performance I attended who were amused, presumably by his sheer randomness.
No actual graffing goes on, though the audience does at least see the end result of what Sketchpad wants to achieve. But the ‘will they, won’t they’ narrative of the second half is too repetitive. A subplot about school bullying and how Sketchpad is dealing with it came across to me as more interesting than the main storyline. Further, Sketchpad’s insists on getting his way – he insists Mute must take his personal situation into account, but when Mute has problems of her own, he has little patience or sympathy, insisting she must follow his plan of action. Perhaps it is childishness, perhaps it is misogyny – perhaps it is both.
Where is the grittiness in a show about keeping one step ahead of the law? The show could be significantly tenser and more unsettling, and only in the final scenes does the production come up with something approaching exhilaration. I can’t fault the acting but the script needs tightening.
Review by Chris Omaweng
“Hit everything from here to … Amersham – end of the line”. He said. So I did. Marked every available surface with my can. Four hours went by. Heart proper pounding.
Two teenagers. One ‘born ‘n bred’ Newham. The other fled the ravages of a Civil War. They don’t know each other… yet. But in the night-time cityscape playground of train yards and tube depots, they escape their troubled and isolated lives spray painting London colourful. Set in the early 2000s, SHADOW KINGDOMS tells the story of an unlikely partnership forged between two strangers, who discover a shared passion for train (graffiti) writing.
Shadow Kingdoms
Written by Berri George
Directed by Adam Dattis
Theatre503
503 Battersea Park Road
London SW11 3BW
Above The Latchmere
5 -16 June 2018
