Review: Tambo & Bones

Tambo & Bones is a refreshing display of fourth-wall-breaking anti-capitalist theatre. Unconcerned with white fragility, the play bravely wields Afro-futurist narratives that experiment with race wars, ecological collapse and intra-communal betrayal with conceptual sharpness. Committed to more than threatening, the play drives these thematics to an unflinching conclusion bold enough to immersively sink imaginations of Black liberated futures directly against the core of white supremacy without remorse. The result? A deeply catalysing call for us to grapple with intra-communal violence and the importance of successfully resisting the corrupting facades of Black capitalism that masquerade as pathways to freedom.

Sweeping through satirical racial commentary with unrelenting pace, Tambo & Bones is a quick-witted two-person inversion of minstrelsy that seeks to make a caricature of whiteness as its main stage entertainment. Characterised throughout with a level of physical seamlessness, Bones, (Daniel Ward) a relentless hustler turned wealth-hoarder determined to find meaning through money and Tambo, (Clifford Samuel) an existentially sensitive overthinker chasing peace of mind, are crafted by Dave Harris into two sides of a coin flipped in an oppositional tussle for freedom and meaning. Their positions as minstrels are written in paradoxical relation to their existential questions around Blackness and freedom, which they realise have been scripted outside of their autonomy, consent and control. With brilliant direction, both actors sustain an unwavering performance that manages to deliver a dense script past the stage and believably into the audience.

Tambo and Bones’ hunt for meaning and freedom is mapped across three time-travelling acts of the play, which span over 400 years. Throughout all three parts, time is used as a point of satire to bounce back the audience's passivity, complicity and power. Nervous titters from the audience at the exaggerated minstrel’s invitational cues in the first act were satirically abandoned by the second with loud whoops and enthusiastic nodding along to hyper-capitalist rap lyrics casually packaging Black violence and death. There were ingratiatingly loud and comfortable responses to Bones’ calls to mimic exaggerated AAVE. The play not only shows how the performative minstreldom and consumerism of Black culture have evolved, but also by casting an internal interrogation of its own written characters’ autonomy, straddles a structurally genius meta-narrative that explores societal oppressive roles and the subsequent struggles within racial uprisings.

‘Unconcerned with white fragility, the play bravely wields Afro-futurist narratives that experiment with race wars, ecological collapse and intra-communal betrayal with conceptual sharpness.’

The range of thematic scope contained within Tambo & Bones is startling. Attempting to paint the corrupting pursuit of wealth accumulation amidst ecological collapse, the limits of consciousness-raising art within a capitalist consumerist context, and the polarisation of race in post-capitalism, as well as intra-communal violence, is no small feat. Impressively, the play manages to weave these threads into a convincing and almost fable-like warning of the pursuit of capitalism over liberation. Towards the middle, there is a fatigue from the extensive over-layering of rap sections, which feels heavy; a tighter pacing around the first two parts would also refine its hold on the audience. Regardless, the themes within the dialogue remains a central engine strong enough to power through the density, especially with its brilliant use of indirect fourth-wall breaks which transform the entire show into a vortex that flips the inherent power usually fixed between subject and stage – forcing privileged audiences to contend with their present-day position as a tenuous one headed into a fixed future with no autonomy.

Tambo & Bones is a pertinent reminder of the capacity of boundary-pushing structural playwriting at its fullest extent. By the third act, technology has become a vehicle for creating a subservient type of white minstrel underclass in an alternative future, directly contrasting with the play’s 19th-century beginning. However, the admittedly clever fashioning as a technological subterfuge to incapacitate colonial oppressors betrays a fascinating masculinisation of resistance. Focusing on the militarisation of water-consuming technology at the end of the world, rather than collective natural resource gathering or knowledge accumulation during an ecological apocalypse through weapons investments, ironically betrays a lack of future thinking and a commitment to the same themes of individualism and capital that the play seeks to critique.

A commitment to patriarchy is also felt in the montage of news reports’ narration of societal decline, which fails to mention any comment on the spike in gender violence known to happen during societal decline. The lack of these perspectives betrays a proximity to and investment in patriarchal positionality that is further cemented by the dominant focal point of choosing two Black cis men carrying the narrative. While the moral critique of wealth-hoarding remains clear, to be taken into the realms of revolutionary theatre, Tambo & Bones would have had to push beyond existential affirmation and individual desires of freedom being the main drivers behind wealth pursuit and pierce into a structural analysis of a corporate state that strategically invests in carving up structures of power into this purposefully dedicated system in order to enact its oppression.

A radical lens would have further woven class intervention and gender analysis into a wider structural analysis of collective uprising through natural resources, rather than a singular narrative of a billionaire genius inventing weapons for collective saviourism. The concept was promising, but we wondered what Tambo & Bones would have looked like if at least one of its duo members was a Black person of a marginalised gender and how it would have imbued the shifting of power between these two characters and their journey with greater nuance and political range. A Black transfeminist reading may have had one character’s epiphany of lack of autonomy contrasted with another's unphased and more ingrained knowledge of oppression, due to coalescing lived experiences under patriarchy and cisessentialism.

‘The concept was promising, but we wondered what Tambo & Bones would have looked like if at least one of its duo was a Black person of a marginalised gender and how it would have imbued the shifting of power between these two characters and their journey with greater nuance and political range’

Despite its limitations, I believe that every single one of us who has been tired of theatre’s lack of white antagonism should go and see Tambo & Bones as a tonic. We cackled so much at the subversions of white supremacy and dehumanisation (white people who once sat primed on the edge of their seats chuckling over their near pass to say the n-word in the dark suddenly sat in grave silence at theatrical gunpoint while the play delivered immersive existential blows unrelentingly), that an offended person tried to shush us in the theater… Which made us laugh even louder.

Theatre that challenges dominant power lines enough for privileged audiences to be outraged is theatre that is unafraid of truly exploring the multi-dimensional range present within a medium that can powerfully model tangible liberation. I never clap for plays that simply reflect our current positionality without experimenting with some edge that drives us forward, because these edges are the crucial stepping stones we so desperately need. Usually, this means I am the only one left sitting down amidst a sea of standing ovations. Tambo & Bones relentlessly delivers a whole arsenal of multi-timeline Black imagination without asking for permission. To be taken into the realm of radical theatre, however, it would have to reassess its vantage point of patriarchal positioning and name conscription into capitalism as not just a moral failing of misplaced self-worth but the agenda of a corporate state as an infrastructure invested in enforcing this oppression for its continued dominance. Modelling communal liberation around more ecologically focused collective tool acquisition, rather than individual militaristic genius and savourism, with an awareness of gender, would have broken the play into the realms of revolution. Despite this, I laughed until I cried, and in proper homage to its subversive form, at the end, I was the only one on my feet clapping at its daring sense of deconstructive imagination.

We saw Tambo & Bones at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, during its National UK Tour. The tour continues in London, opening tonight at Stratford East and running until 10th May, before concluding its final leg in Leeds on 24th May 2025. Tickets are available from the ATC’s website.

‘Unconcerned with white fragility, the play bravely wields Afro-futurist narratives that experiment with race wars, ecological collapse and intra-communal betrayal with conceptual sharpness.’

‘The concept was promising, but we wondered what Tambo & Bones would have looked like if at least one of its duo was a Black person of a marginalised gender and how it would have imbued the shifting of power between these two characters and their journey with greater nuance and political range’

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