THEATRE REVIEW: ‘PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’
By Stella Backhouse
One of the most important strands of twenty-first century revisionist history has been its prioritising of Britain’s slaving and colonialist past to the building of the modern nation. Like his 2021 poetry collection of the same name on which it is based, former Birmingham Poet Laureate Casey Bailey’s new single-hander Please Do Not Touch explores both the structural legacies of this long-suppressed truth and the personal consequences for Black British citizens living in its shadow. Bailey succinctly summarised this double focus in a pre-production interview with Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre, when he said that audiences could expect “a human story of someone who is living under the pressure of a system that is not built to serve them”.
The springboard from which the play develops its themes is an incident in an English stately home. Mason, a young Black Briton, is impressed by the splendour of a Georgian country estate so big that “a phone screen is not big enough to understand the size”, but disappointed by the sanitisation of the slave labour whose profits financed its creation, and by the (guilty?) lack of information about African artefacts that have clearly been systematically looted from their place of origin. Things explode when, his curiosity getting the better of him, Mason removes a Somali comb from its unlocked display case and is immediately wrestled to the ground by a security guard. Found guilty of attempted theft, he is sentenced to eighteen months in a Young Offenders’ Institution.
Credit: Nicola Young Photography
Against this background of differing outcomes dependent on who is doing the ‘stealing’, control of the interface between morality and legality emerges as essential. A system whose aim is to privilege the interests of certain groups only, must protect them from accusations of illegality even if their actions are immoral. In fact, this is just one aspect of a Kafka-esque regime that works to confound Mason at every turn. In the Young Offenders’ Institution where the bulk of the action takes place, his growing love of books is rewarded by exclusion from his beloved library and its potential sources of enlightenment, accompanied by warnings that protest can go too far but leaving unanswered the question of ‘too far for who?’.
Although the constellation of injustice within which Mason exists is described as “a labyrinth of immoral systems all holding each other up and holding all else down”, my experience of Please Do Not Touch was more akin to a nest of Russian dolls. At the centre was the library, the locus of knowledge from which – ironically for someone locked in a prison – Mason was shut out. Outside the library was the unremittingly grey prison environment represented by a square as the cell and, beyond that, by the larger but still circumscribed prison space between actor and audience. Beyond that, but not separated from it: the audience. The question Bailey perhaps wanted us to consider was – are we outside the prison? Or inside it, with Mason?
One closed box was not part of the prison. I did wonder if more could have been made of the parallels between Mason’s situation and that of the stolen (depending on your interpretation of the word) Afro-comb that he dared to lift from the sterility of its accidentally-unlocked display case. If the comb could have told its story – where and how it was made, what purpose it served, what it meant to its original owner, how it came to be in Britain – perhaps it could have opened the door on a vibrantly different way of being in the world and a concrete illustration of what history looks like when told from a different perspective.
The poetic origins of Please Do Not Touch shine through in its lyrical but still accessible phrasing and its inclusion of rap; but what really brought it to life was a superlative performance from Tijan Sarr as Mason. Switching between a range of characters with a mere shift of shoulders or tweak of accent, he deftly summed up the essence of each one, rendering them instantly recognisable. Encompassing reason, rage and stoicism by turns, his portrayal of a good person trapped inside a system not built to serve him will stay in the mind.
Please Do Not Touch premiered at The Belgrade Theatre, Coventry from 11th to 21st September 2024. The next performance is at National Trust – Attingham Park, Shropshire on Tuesday 24th September and then at National Trust – Upton House & Gardens, Warwickshire on 27th to 28th September. For more information, check out China Plate Theatre.