As the Mother of a Brown Boy explores the life and early death of Mischa Niering, killed in a crash whilst fleeing the scene of a failed robbery at Tiffany’s. As the title suggests, the play is unashamedly polemical in its support of Mischa, unsurprisingly given that he was a member of its acting company Chickenshed and his mother, Karen Niering, was heavily involved in the production. Nonetheless, it attempts to get to the root of the choices that ultimately led to Mischa’s death and at the same time act as a meditation on society, identity and race more widely.
The production makes heavy use of physical and musical theatre, with dance, video and song all making an appearance. For the most part this worked well, in particular by drawing a contrast between the impersonal bureaucracy of the coroner’s court (shown only in video) and the Mischa’s human relationships, expressed through dance and song. Also effective was the use of set: fifteen white boxes, which the cast climbed and danced over under around and through. As the boxes increasingly came to physically constrain Mischa, the implication was that they represented the less tangible but equally real boxes he was put in by society, but the suggestion never felt heavy-handed, even when they were finally used to signify his coffin. The only unsuccessful element was the use of rap, which felt jarring and forced. In particular, the skit on The Declaration of Human Rights, clearly intended to express righteous anger, was unintentionally hilarious, sounding like an overenthusiastic politics teacher trying to connect with the ‘yoof’.
The main weakness of the production, though, is the script, which often rings false. Whilst Mischa’s dances with his mother seemed an utterly natural expression of love, her monologue was sometimes extremely clunky. Phrases like ‘you needed your black father in order to identify yourself’ or ‘when did the colour of his skin become an issue’ read more like statements from a governmental think-tank on race than the heartfelt soul-searching of a grieving mother. The burning questions for the audience are what drove Mischa to crime, and why society allowed him to fall through the cracks, but we are neither offered any real reasons for his involvement in gang activity, nor given a searing indictment of police or societal oppression, and the result is a flat production, which undermines the energy of the powerful true story with the rehashing of old clichés.
Having said that, it would be impossible to deny that As the Mother of a Brown Boy remains emotionally powerful. At the conclusion of the play, we are shown a series of photographs of the real Mischa, a reminder, if any were necessary, that the events of the drama had an all too strong basis in reality. It was a laudable effort by Chickenshed to commemorate of one of their own, and the more beautiful moments of dance and song came across as joyous celebration of Mischa’s life. However, in falling back on platitudes and clichés, they fail to really explore his individual identity, and thus fail to do complete justice to his memory.
three stars out of five
