Public enemy

Arinzé Kene’s play Misty is a collection of rap numbers and skits about a fare dodger, Lucas, from Hackney. Lucas (played by Kene) gets into a scuffle on a bus and is later arrested for entering London Zoo without a ticket. That’s the entire narrative. Obviously, Kene can’t create an evening’s entertainment from such meagre pickings, so he turns his tribulations as a dramatist into the show’s second storyline.

Playwrights moaning about writing plays is a theme of scant interest to audiences, but Kene enlists our sympathy by examining his quest to write a drama that satisfies both black people and the playgoing bourgeoisie. His friends predict that Lucas’s story will end up as a ‘nigger play’, or an example of ‘urban jungle safari shit’. Kene dramatises the problem of stereotyping as follows. A female friend lectures him about Hollywood’s false portrayal of black people as violent. Then she tells Kene that she’ll burn down the theatre if she dislikes the play about Lucas.