The Purists, Kiln Theatre review - warm, witty, thoughtful and un-woke

Watching Dan McCabe’s 2019 play, older folk might be reminded of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s indelible lyrics, “Can blue men sing the whites, or are they hypocrites…?” The Purists moves the question into the 21st century in a teasing but very enjoyable way.

Clearly McCabe has dodged the attention of the cultural appropriation monitors here, a young white man daring to write about hiphop, seemingly a passion of his. His play tags a weightier form of cultural appropriation: the incursion of capitalism into the world of emcees and rap battles, where the enemy is seen as the mighty record industry, run by executives who claim they don’t know how to market a young rapper whose “raw spit” is about Black pride and consciousness-raising. They want guns and gangstas, violence and misogyny.

The play’s two Black protagonists were stars of the 1990s hiphop scene, now with bank accounts emptied and prospects blighted, still trying to “keep it real” in their late forties but increasingly adrift of the mainstream. Mr Bugz (Richard Pepple) deejays for a radio station; Lamont Born Cipher (Sule Rimi) squats with his sister while struggling to get his talented rapper nephew a recording deal. They were legends in their own professional lifetimes. Now, as an angry Bugz woundingly accuses Lamont, he isn’t relevant; record companies are more likely to sign a white rapper. 

These are two of the play’s three purists, each trying to stay true to hiphop’s roots in their way. Lamont, whose band was called the Enlightenuz. is part of a faction that styles itself “the gods”: Black men trying to bring enlightenment to the 85% of the population they consider “sheeple”. He claims he isn’t anti-white, just anti the devilish “white mind” that can afflict any race. But when he makes a Black Power salute, the room falls silent. 

Lamont traces his cultural legacy back to Ethiopia and Egypt; for him, hiphop is the Black genre, peaceable and a source of pride. Bugz is more of a cultural cataloguer, a hiphop archivist who loves debating best-of lists with Lamont. But he’s a sampler not a spitter, a man who measures out his life in modish trainers, some 400 pairs of them. He doesn’t openly profess his beliefs; he has secrets that may threaten his livelihood. 

Into this mix McCabe throws a third purist: Gerry (Jasper Britton, pictured below left), except he’s white, a generation older than Lamont and Bugz, and his religion is the classic Broadway musical. While they play vintage hiphop out on the stoop of the building in Queens, NY, where he and Bugz live, Gerry is upstairs singing along to The King and I, the highly appropriate “Getting to Know You”, which has to bow to Public Enemy’s “Shut ‘Em Down”, blasted out on the combined forces of Bugz’s iPod and Lamont’s old beatbox outside.

The technology alone marks out the two ageing hiphoppers as old-school. Then in scoots Val Kano (spot-on Tiffany Gray, pictured right with Sule Rimi), the handle of a spry, pint-sized, twentysomething Puerto Rican, delivering Gerry his cocaine. While there, she tries to educate him in money transfers by phone app. Cue a priceless rant from Gerry about the plague of modern IT with its torture-by-password-resets. Val is an aspiring rapper of some note, as is the fifth character, Nancy (Emma Kingston, pictured below right), a white graduate who works for Gerry and his theatre bosses. He has promised her an entrée to Lamont, whom she gushingly reveres.

This five-character concoction offers a multi-faceted probing of what truth and authenticity mean in an era of mass comms and global reach, where little stays exclusive. Lamont keeps it real by following his creed, exemplified by the homilies he aims directly at the audience beginning, “Arm Leg Leg Arm Head”, an acronym for Allah. McCabe shows, though, that this certainty can shade over into a subset of misogyny and, worse, zealotry. Bugz is a gentler ideologue, more flexible but also very confused about himself, and especially by his sexuality, which leads him into dishonesty. (Pepple is, if anything, too gentle, some of his dialogue inaudible. Everyone else comes through loud and clear.)

Gerry is the scene-stealer. Britton (pictured left), in a revelatory turn, totally inhabits this foghorn, camp musicals-queen who loathes Lamont’s “rippity rippity” and Bugz’s “scratchy scratchy with the records” with a comic ferocity. Gerry lost his great platonic love, along with most of his friends, to Aids. A millionaire, he also lost all his money, moved by the prospect of imminent death to splurge it all on drinks for whoever was in the room. HIs perfectly timed put-downs and acid aperçus are Wildean and treasurable; this is a man who has ridden out his confusions and settled in a narrow but often contented groove of whiskey, weed and the superior rhyming of Cole Porter.

As the characters spar, it becomes clear they share more than they realise. Nancy and Gerry play a game not unlike Lamont and Bugz’s lists of the hiphop greats, where one of four stellar musicals composers has to be axed. Nancy and Val form an unspoken bond after they have an impromptu rap-battle on the stoop, and Val unexpectedly goes to see Nancy’s debut hiphop musical —in the wake of Hamilton, it’s no surprise that it’s a feminist paean to Amelia Earhart. The audience apparently loved it. Only Lamont and Bugz’s 30-year relationship shows some worrying faultlines.

Nancy turns out to be a creditable rhymer, but still, she is a middle class white woman styling it out like the rappers she loves. She admits her rap-battle line “chick-chick-kapow/ I’m a rearrange your smile” is wholly inauthentic as she is a nice Jewish girl who has never once held a gun. And she lives in Scarsdale. Is her adulatory mimicry the same as inauthenticity? Does it matter? Is dilution the inevitable price to be paid for the assimilation of a minority culture into the mainstream one, however dominant its influence seems to be at the time? Is Lamont going to end up as irritated by modern life as Gerry is, but with fewer creature comforts and scabrous retorts? Oddly, there’s an air of Chekhov about McCabe’s purists, voluntarily trapped in their pasts and unable to move on.

This is a witty, warm, thoughtful evening, directed by Amit Sharma with a keen eye for sharp comic timing. Each element works: the economical yet evocative skeletal set, with gorgeous giant murals as a backdrop; the clever bursts of music (Rhapsody in Blue to hiphop beats is brilliant); and in particular the excellent cast (top marks to voice coach Hazel Holder). With a full house that was up for it, their intro and outro numbers, inviting the audience to join in and party, would take the roof off. The production deserves it.

The Purists at the Kiln until 21 December

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