Chadwick Boseman’s Deep Azure at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe – review

Long before he became a worldwide star redefining the notion of heroism in Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman made a different kind of impact with this extraordinary play.

Written in 2005, it blends hip-hop, Shakespeare and the revenge tradition of Jacobean theatre, to explore Black aspiration, police brutality, eating disorders and even God. It is astonishingly ambitious and constantly intriguing.

Because of its rhyming form, and the way it draws on old traditions to make new points, it’s a brilliant choice to give it its UK premiere in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse where the candlelit setting and gold-embossed stage, gleams and glitters as it is reflected in designer Paul Wills’ twisted spire of reflective silver balls and domed silver seats.

This clever blend of futurism with history continues when Boseman’s chorus, dressed as robots in clinging silver lycra, appear through the audience to comment on the story we are about to witness: popping, locking, beatboxing and singing everything from Samuel Barber to gospel to pop, they remain a constant presence, underlining the drama, pointing up the moral.

The story – based on an experience in Boseman’s own life – is about Deep, a Black university student who is shot by police, and the different reactions that triggers from his girlfriend Azure (Selina Jones), and his male friends Tone (Elijah Cook, subtle and quiet) and Roshad (Justice Ritchie, permanently furious) as they campaign for justice after his death.

The plot teeters on the edge of melodrama, particularly in the second half, and the piece is too long (running at nearly three hours with an interval). But it contains riches. Most fascinating of all is the portrayal of Deep (a gentle Jayden Elijah) not just as a prince (there are constant echoes of Hamlet) but also a saintly figure, on the verge of entering a seminary, committed to visionary good works. “What you say is berserk/Is God’s work,” he says, at one point.

Meanwhile, Azure is locked in a battle with eating disorders and fragile mental health, in the grip of terrible body dysmorphia, convinced that by starving herself she can control events and force the truth to emerge. Jones plays her with agonised power, revealing all her charm and intelligence as she grapples with her illness. She is destroyed by Deep’s death, not just because of its pointlessness, but because she feels she failed to appreciate the happiness they had.

All of this is conveyed in lyrical verse, at once tough and twisting, and yet shot through with great passages of tenderness and beauty as in the story of the caterpillar that Deep has left in his notebook to be told to a child who will never now be born.

Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu, who directed For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy, brings the same imaginative heft to the action here. He carefully reflects every shift of mood from the romantic – in flashback, Deep creates an entire world for Azure to thrive in – to the funny – as when the entire chorus enact the scenes Tone and Roshad are watching as they switch channels on an imaginary TV.

With movement director Tanake Bingwa, he fills the space with life but also with the shadows of sadness and incomprehension. It’s an incredibly thoughtful, beautifully acted production, that creates its own atmosphere.

There are flaws. It feels like a young man’s play, trying new things and not always achieving them. Of course, the tragedy of Boseman is that he died a young man, of cancer in 2020, at the age of 43. Deep Azure is a reminder that his death robbed us not only of a magnificent actor, but a remarkable writer as well.