Connor Allen's autobiographical show, Forgiveness of a Monster, is a production filled with smoke and mirrors, both literal and figurative. Smoke swirls from a pit on a darkened stage, while jagged mirrors stand like rocks across it. This emotionally anguished play features a mixed-heritage protagonist, played by Allen, who has been abandoned by his Jamaican father and raised by his Welsh mother. His inability to forgive his father takes him back to Jamaica, where he experiences a psychic watershed.
Ambitious Shifts in Form and Tone
This twister of a drama shifts ambitiously in form and tone, sliding between gothic thriller, family psychodrama, and standup-style direct address. At one point, Allen interacts with the audience with tipples of gin in warmly comic tones. He has inner demons, spoken of in armchair sessions with a therapist who features as a disembodied voice. But there is also an actual, singing, demonic figure, played by Mya Fox-Scott, who, we are told, made a pact with his father.
Original Treatment and Strong Performances
The show is highly original in its treatment of material, featuring fantastic rap, spoken word, song, and music, all of which reach the gut. There are excellent performances from Allen and Fox-Scott, who has a fabulous singing voice, as well as Oraine Johnson, who plays drums and adds to the dialogue. However, the production is hard to decode in meaning, or even follow as a story. It becomes opaque with mysteries, including a singing character, also played by Fox-Scott, who might be his mother—she speaks of a lost child and his sibling.
Ambition Overwhelms Clarity
The production seems hamstrung by its ambition to do and say too much. Tonia Daley-Campbell's direction does not manage to bring clarity to the script's many parts. The result is like several plays sutured together. A final conversation with his father means all is now clear for the protagonist, but not for us, partly because that conversation is not dramatised. As a story, it is promising but confusing. What is clear is there is talent here. If it were better harnessed, it could all soar.
Forgiveness of a Monster is at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, until 23 May.
