Theatre Review: Black Superhero is good-looking but skin deep

Black Superhero
Royal Court, London, until April 29

There’s almost certainly a great play to be written about gay black and mixed-race men – the objectification they can be subjected to by gay white men, the way they are sometimes disowned by their families and pilloried within their communities, the double dose of prejudice they have to face from certain people – but Black Superhero sadly isn’t it.

The play is the debut work of the actor and activist Danny Lee Wynter and its fundamental problem is that it has much too much to say for itself. It also seems uncertain whether its purpose is to amuse, to make points or simply to try to shock. It’s going on about whether straight actors should play gay characters one moment, then it’s having a go at the Queen Consort next, how awful white liberal men can be, and then, without a pause for breath, it’s wondering if gay marriage was really such a great idea. And so it
goes on, and on.

The title alludes to the crush that struggling actor Lee Wynter as David has on a charismatic African-American star named King (Dyllón Burnside) who appears in a cinema superhero franchise. This at least allows the director, Daniel Evans, and his designer, Joanna Scotcher, to have a lot of fun – with their brilliant lighting man, Ryan Day – conjuring up images of the Batman-like figure emerging from the shadows or looming over the proceedings.

The show may have good looks, but, as is so often the case with good looks,
there’s not a lot else. The actors – including Lee Wynter, who was incidentally brilliant in the National’s recent revival of The Normal Heart – do what they can with the material, but it’s a largely thankless task.

It skims over a lot of important issues, without examining any one of them sufficiently insightfully.

I felt especially for Dominic Holmes and Ben Allen playing a variety of largely gormless stereotypical white men. Black Superhero’s most unforgivable sin, however, is that it’s ultimately very boring, and, at two and
a half hours, much too long.

Still, the prominent warnings of nudity that the theatre is putting out will almost certainly pack the punters in, even if it is, in fact, fleeting and rather coy.