Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.You’ll have seen it before: a pair of shoes hanging from an overhead wire. The sight can take on symbolic significance, and in Tife Kusoro’s dizzying drama, that meaning becomes mystical.Here, urban legend has it that one particular pair of white trainers, which swing above Madeleine Boyd’s set with an unearthly glow, belonged to a young Black boy who, while being pursued by police for a crime he didn’t commit, was fatally hit by a car. Twenty years later, Baitface the Gullyman haunts the area, ready to come for any Black teenager who walks beneath the trainers with his face uncovered. Is he after them? Or is he protecting them?Local teenagers Kai (Selorm Adonu), Khaleem (Ebenezer Gyau) and Joy (Kadiesha Belgrave) know the rules — Kai even runs a profitable little enterprise selling balaclavas to other teenagers. So when CCTV places them in the area at the time a crime was committed and Khaleem takes down the trainers to impress a would-be date, their lives spiral into a panic in which daily events become entangled with the supernatural.Kusoro has talked about the influence of Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over, which likewise turns the playing space into a liminal world where the real and the fantastical, the intimate and the epic, collide. But she also draws on popular fantasy and horror movies, using genres the characters might enjoy in order to express their difficulties. Gradually we learn that Khaleem is struggling with grief, Joy with gender identity and all three with trying to get through school while under suspicion simply because of the colour of their skin. Being seen is a theme on multiple levels.All of this is explored through a playful and fast-moving script that zips about unpredictably. One moment the three are teenagers teasing one another, the next they are transformed into jerky figures on a CCTV tape, the next they are transfixed by the arrival of the eerie Baitface (played by Dani Harris-Walters as a sinister presence).Sometimes the switchbacks are so snappy that the play becomes confusing. But director Monique Touko and her super cast keep you transfixed, juggling the mix of comedy and dread. In the end, it’s a piece about friendship, about being 16 and Black, and about being understood — all expressed with an originality that marks Kusoro out as a writer to watch.★★★☆☆To September 21, royalcourttheatre.com
