Monique Touko has been working.
Having captured my attention for her work on Lyric Hammersmith's School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play written by Jocelyn Bioh, she’s been persistent in her pursuit for theatrical domination, and her work on G is no different.
The play follows 3 school friends on the cusp of adulthood embroiled in the legend of Baitface, a tall tale who steals Black boys' faces. Narratively, we’re thrown back and forth throughout time, nothing quite makes sense at the start, but as the actors take their final bows, we’re given a “glimmer of hope at the end”. It’s a striking watch, heightened by the sharp movement direction from Kloé Dean (Little Simz), it helps to place the audience in that feeling of unease which only comes with a tense thriller. The lighter moments are also encapsulated with a sense of urgency which the cast carry beautifully.
Before I sit down with Monique I have the chance to interview her young cast; Selorm, Kadiesha and Ebenezer, they’re animated about how Monique has made them feel welcomed in the rehearsal room.
“Every project feels very different,” Monique explains about joining the ‘writer’s theatre’, Royal Court. G is being staged in the Jerwood Upstairs Theatre; it’s smaller in size with intimate seating running stage-side, which is designed almost like a runway. In the rehearsal room the floor is sectioned off to indicate the boundaries of the stage, Monique sits animated as she watches her cast play out the world she has built alongside writer, Tife Kusoro.
“It fell onto my lap,” she explains about how she came to work on G for Royal Court. Artistic Director, David Byrne was working on his final season and, “I’d always wanted to have a show at The Court… I read the first couple of pages and I was like, “I'm already sold, because I feel like this is going to be a challenge.””
G has been penned as a play inspired by urban legend and afro-surrealism. Tife tells the audience, in a post show talk supported by Faber Books, how she wrote it for her younger brother and it felt like a “fun way to explore everyday ideas”.
On the ideation side of things back in the rehearsal room, we gain a glimpse at a back wall covered in a collage of source material. I spotted the face of Daniel Kaluuya, 90s horror flicks and episodes of Black Mirror. Research and Development was critical for a play of this nature where drawing from the fantastical and surrealism helped to heighten the weird factor,
“We wanted to look at spaces or, like, depictions of worlds where there was kind of either parallel universes or where, where there's a doubling of the character within it. So we looked at different influences regarding that. I think that also the thing with this piece as well, is that, because you know a lot of the copies, or when you talk about certain things, particularly when it is about black people or black males always kind of falls into, like, the urban category, which is the word I kind of hate, because I'm just like, what does that even mean? I feel like it's quite dated, and I think we need to think of a new word. But yeah, I think my main thing was just like, not falling into stereotypes. I think people are going to come with a perception of what it is actually. Let's not do that. Let's create an abstract space where people have to interpret whatever they want to interpret.”
Another beautiful thing, the way Monique speaks about Tife. It’s clear there’s a level of understanding for the craft of her work and how Monique has endeavoured to really understand it before directing her cast. “She's not precious, but she's very clear. I feel like, when I got G, it was a very complete, full body piece of work. So, it's so nice. I went through a process where you trust the material and you know, it's robust enough to kind of go through with the rehearsal process and come out the other end, but working with Tifé has been wonderful.”
One thing that Monique felt differently about this time around? The technical elements of the play. Traditionally, a play goes into ‘tech’ the last week of rehearsals, but with G things were different, “Normally, in a piece, you understand the art, you understand what's what's happening with this, because she's (Tife) playing with time, she's playing with perspective, she's playing with genre…is this story clear? … So I think for me, it's been really interesting, because I feel like at this point in the process, normally, I'm like, “Okay, we'll wait till Tech” where it's like, no, with this one, we really have to anticipate how we're going to tell the story, which kind of reduces the expiration time. But luckily, we had an R&D before we went into the room. Yeah, we've just been creative so we're able to figure it out before we get in the room.”
And on working with black creatives, “it's essential. I want to ensure that my main goal in getting into theatre is to ensure that you're creating an environment where people can come and feel seen, so being able to look into a room and to see yourself is really important. To be able to enter the room and understand that the black people in the room are making the decisions as well. I think that was really affirming for my actors, actually, to come into this process knowing that their movement director and their director and their sound designer are black.”
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