Soul (Royal & Derngate, Northampton)
"Not everything in this world is about you, Marvin Gaye," yells Alberta Gay, mother of the soul superstar. Not even, it seems, Roy Williams' staged biography: The Untold Story of Marvin Gaye. If this is anyone's story, it's that of Marvin Gay Senior – the Kentucky-born preacher with a temper and a taste for transvestism who finally took his son's life in April 1984. Most biographies will tell you Marvin Gaye was shot by his father. Williams flips that on its head. As Alberta cries out to her daughters: "Your father shot Marvin."
It's a sly reversal, one that gradually pushes against its own form and, indeed, the notion of the elevated genius. "If I'm not a headliner," Gaye mopes into his vodka bottle, "I'm nobody." Here, we hardly hear any of his music – no "Sexual Healing", no "Let's Get It On", no "Heard It On The Grapevine". At times, Gaye seems like a periphery figure in his own life story. What's going on?
Come the interval, I had written Soul off as little more than a dramatised Wikipedia entry. The first half purrs through Gaye's early years with the mechanised ease of a television documentary, his two sisters, Jeanne and Zeola, narrating his journey from talented choirboy to rising star of the soul scene via some tumultuous teenage years. He clashes with his priggish preacher of a father, and catches the woman he loves, singer Tammi Terrell (Abiona Omonua, one hell of a voice), when she dies mid-duet. Every event is neatly dispatched in Williams' script, sanded down and sanitised into something neatly informative but obviously over-simplified – a story as smooth as a saxophone solo.
The second half switches register. Set in the luxury LA pad Gaye shared with his parents in the late-seventies – a vision in pine and pleather, carpet shaggy as a sheepdog – Williams charts the family's breakdown, as Marvin's ego envelopes those around him. Having promised his father his own church, conciliation for having thwarted the man's only dream, he fails to deliver and, as his mother detioriates towards death, after years of marital hostility and betrayal, Marvin even makes her terminal illness all about him. "I don't know I can watch her die."
It gets a beautifully poised production from director James Dacre, one that suggests the Gay home as a kind of church, echoing the Father-Son dynamic in Williams' script. Outwardly serene and blinking in slow motion, Nathan Ives-Moiba makes Marvin a messiah of his own imagination, supposedly sacrificing himself for his family and his art, even as his drug use and paranoia spiral out of control. Leo Wringer is his resolute, indignant father, an Old Testament type whose moral absolutism applies to everyone but himself. Having forced his wife to give up her first illegitimate child, he proceeds to sow his seed as liberally as the farmer in Matthew 13.
Best of all though, is Adjoa Andoh. As Alberta Gay, she shows how impossibly magnetic alpha masculinity can be. A strong woman, hearty and self-assured, she's nonetheless incapable of refusing either her husband or her son, resigning herself, instead, to the role of peacemaker, but powerless to prevent their mutual self-destruction. In a warning against pride and rampant egotism, she's the moral heart of Soul.
Soul runs at the Royal & Derngate until 11 June, then transfers to the Hackney Empire from 15 June to 3 July.
