CHOIR BOY

Theatre Royal Stratford East

★★★★

“The dialogue crackles with energy and drama, with each performer wearing their personality with complete conviction”

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s 2012 play “Choir Boy” is essentially a coming-of-age story set in a select boarding school for boys which tackles the themes of bullying, identity, sexuality and cultural history that we have come to expect. But McCraney delves deeper than this, with an approach so beautifully subtle that the layers peel back often unnoticed. Like a piece of music that shifts from the major to the minor keys in small progressions, we only realise we have wandered in a new direction when our emotions tell us. Compellingly moving and often acutely funny, “Choir Boy” delivers its punches with tenderness.

It centres around five of the students that form the choir at the Charles R Drew Preparatory School. Opening with a gospel-tinged chorale that repeats the refrain ‘trust and obey’, we soon learn that the rules, if not broken, are stretched to breaking point. The singing – all a Capella – throughout is sublime, its harmonies a reflection of how much of an ensemble piece this is, with the natural dynamics between the five boys being instantly believable. Pharus (Terique Jarrett) is the self-appointed leader, although his position is thrown into question after a recital is interrupted by fellow singer Bobby (Rabi Kondé) covertly throwing a racist and homophobic slur at him. Pharus refuses to ‘snitch’ on Bobby which puts him in conflict with Headmaster Marrow (Daon Broni) who is caught between laying down the rules but also allowing his pupils’ uniqueness to flourish.

The issues of bullying and homophobia are a veneer. Despite varying backgrounds, the characters seem to be on a level playing field, and a lot of the conflict is affectionate jostling. Pharus, who is openly gay, shares his dorm with AJ (Freddie MacBruce). Their relationship is close knit, like siblings almost; constantly at war but undyingly supportive. Jarett’s Bobby provides more tension, along with his side kick Junior (Khalid Daley), and adding more complication to the already volatile mix is David (Michael Ahomka-Lindsay). The dialogue crackles with energy and drama, with each performer wearing their personality with complete conviction. When replacement choirmaster enters, the questions of race are taken up a further notch. Mr Pendleton (Martin Turner) seems to be the only white person in the school, yet he is the one most sensitive to and intolerant of racial abuse.

Which all leads to debates about tradition and history. Framed within class exercises and musical refrains, these discussions emerge and explode as naturally as the performances. Nancy Medina directs with this very much in mind, so that the jumps from song to storytelling are seamless. And the deeper discussions never feel like a debate. When Pharus rebukes Bobby for using the word ‘slave’ instead of ‘enslaved’, McCraney avoids the obvious and well-worn polemic and instead the focus explores the evolution of the ‘Spirituals’ and the spread of Black music. Pharus encapsulates the arguments with the simple phrase that the lyrics need to be evaluated for what they ‘meant’ and not what they ‘mean’.

Whatever the message, the music that weaves through the play touches us on a truly emotional level. Arranged by Femi Temowo, the Hymnals, Gospels and Spirituals are sung with gut wrenching honesty and breathtaking harmonious precision. The cast break out into solos but always return to the ensemble to remind us that they are all in this together. This harmony informs the piece. There are moments of discord, but hope lies in the constant spiritual refrain. This isn’t just about kids under pressure to discover and prove who they are. It’s not a queer play, nor a Black one. It’s not a musical, nor is it a straight drama. It is all of these, arranged into one unique chord. “Choir Boy” is in a class of its own.

CHOIR BOY

Theatre Royal Stratford East

Reviewed on 31st March 2026

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Mark Senior

CHOIR BOY

★★★★

“sharp and funny”

After a smash-hit run at last summer’s Edinburgh Fringe, Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates x) arrives at Soho Theatre with the confidence of a show that knows its audience. Jade Franks’ debut play is a brisk, 60-minute one-woman piece that takes a familiar premise — the working-class student parachuted into Oxbridge — and refreshes it with wit, warmth and a sharp eye for the contradictions of class mobility in contemporary Britain.

At its core, this is a classic fish-out-of-water story. Franks’ protagonist unexpectedly secures a place at Cambridge University and finds herself navigating the polished self-assurance of her upper-class peers: the Tillys, Millys and Jillys who move through the world as if it were designed expressly for them. She is by turns dazzled by their ease and quietly unnerved by it, but more devastated by their taste in music, casual dressing, and outright disdain for her native Liverpool. What keeps the piece feeling fresh, not just another piece of class confrontation, is Franks herself. Drawing heavily on her own experiences, the script is peppered with contemporary cultural references and delivered with a conversational charm that makes it feel as though she’s chatting to an audience of her mates (only half true, judging by the crowd the night I visit) rather than performing a polished monologue.

It is striking how little has changed. Alan Hollinghurst’s 1980s class drama The Line of Beauty, recently revived at the Almeida, explored the same entrenched hierarchies, albeit with added doses of gender and sexual politics. Franks’ modern-day account suggests that four decades on, the fault lines remain stubbornly intact. The broader political backdrop may be different, but the rules of belonging appear largely unchanged. It’s fitting that Eat the Rich’s director, Tatenda Shamiso, has assisted on Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys, bringing with him an ethos that theatre should be a broad church, centring marginalised voices.

There’s a pleasing frankness, fittingly, to the way Franks charts her character’s naivety, particularly when she takes a job as a cleaner. She leads a double life: rubbing shoulders with the landed gentry by day while scrubbing their toilets by night. The absurdity of this split existence is never laboured, but its emotional toll quietly accumulates. Things start to look up for Jade when a potential romantic interest appears in the form of Greg — fit, football-playing, and entirely untouched by hardship. But as time goes on, and she imagines how her life would change with him, it slowly dawns on her that the superficiality of what drew them together masks the underlying and irreconcilable gulf between their two worlds.

Though that may seem bleak, Eat the Rich is perfectly well balanced and more positive than pessimistic. There’s tentative hope for a future that feels on the brink of something transformative, even if its shape remains unclear. A fleeting but affecting encounter with a girl “even more northern” than her at the Freshers’ Fair blossoms into an easy intimacy, the relief of recognising yourself in someone else. It’s only through the clear-eyed observations of her sister, the outsider to the Cambridge bubble Jade has become immersed in, that the protagonist fully grasps how contrived, even performative, the whole affair can be.

In the programme notes, dramaturg Ellie Fulcher reveals that the play was first conceived after both she and Franks were made redundant, sustained by jokes that it would all be worth it once they were “big and famous”. That punchline now feels prophetic. With Eat the Rich picked up by Netflix, Franks joins the lineage of Fringe successes like Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. If this sharp and funny debut is anything to go by, she may well capture the mood of the nation next.

Tag Archives: Tatenda Shamiso

CHOIR BOY

★★★★

Theatre Royal Stratford East

CHOIR BOY

Theatre Royal Stratford East

★★★★

“The dialogue crackles with energy and drama, with each performer wearing their personality with complete conviction”