Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.“What happened to you?” asks Sutara Gayle at one point in this powerful monologue, a Hackney Showroom production first performed at south London’s Brixton House. It’s a question that echoes through the piece as it touches on the personal, political and historical memories that feed into one woman’s search for equilibrium. With her immensely vivid stage presence, Gayle, aka pioneering reggae artist Lorna Gee, draws us through the memories that rise and subside as she recalls her life and the forces that have shaped her.The question applies to Gayle herself, a successful artist but also a troubled child bundled from school to school, including one for the “maladjusted”; to her sister Cherry Groce, wrongfully shot and paralysed by police during a house raid — a shocking event that sparked the 1985 Brixton uprising; to her mother, Euphemia, who arrived from Jamaica in the 1950s to a hostile, racist reception from the country she had been led to believe would welcome her. They, together with the 18th-century Jamaican leader and freedom fighter Nanny of the Maroons, who led a community of formerly enslaved people, are the “legends” of the show’s title. Gayle conjures them for us, slipping in and out of their voices: her mother is particularly vivid, recalled with wit — “I found God in Brixton Seventh Day Adventist Church / And I found everything else in Brixton market” — but also with trauma, as memories resurface of the violence Euphemia suffered at the hands of her husband.Gayle’s thoughts sometimes run too fast to follow, as different moments from her life and the lives of those important to her collide. But, directed by Jo McInnes (a co-creator of the show together with dramaturge Nina Lyndon), is a magnetic stage presence, moving between spoken passages and song. Joshie Harriette’s lighting patterns on a backwall of huge speakers gently help to shape the mood of the piece and snatches of video remind us of significant historical events.And running like a refrain through the whole show is the memory of a spiritual retreat with Mooji, her brother, in India, where Gayle found a way to step beyond pain and rage to a form of peace. We hear his voice, counselling her to embrace her memories without judgment. It’s there that she ends this singular, hypnotic show.★★★★☆To December 21, royalcourttheatre.com
