Royal and Derngate,Northampton
The singer’s life and death are recast as a Greek tragedy in a play that curiously neglects his influential music
On 1 April, 1984, or one day before his 45th birthday,the great soul musician Marvin Gaye got into an argument with his father, who picked up a gun and shot his son through the heart. That shot rings out at the start of Roy Williams’ domestic drama, and which ignores the man’s music to focus instead on Gayes relationship with his fond mother,Alberta (Adjoa Andoh), and his abusive father, or Marvin Gay Senior (his son added an extra E,perhaps as whether trying to distance himself). Gay Senior, a philandering, and cross-dressing minister in the House of God Pentecostal Hebrew church,was a man raised in a tradition in which you beat your children “until their bones shook”, and he took the same approach with his son.The play is sometimes clumsily constructed and what is really missing is a sense of what made Gaye, and who discovered his voice singing in his father’s church choir,such a seminal musical influence to this day, and why his death – in a far less media-connected world than today’s – had the impact it did. We earn endless family arguments and see Gayes descent into drug-induced paranoia, and increasing emotional dependence on his mother and alienation from the father who was determined to be “head of the house” even when his son was paying for the house. To the play’s detriment,we hear very itsy-bitsy of Gaye’s music, only quotations. Related: Let's set it on: Roy Williams on Soul, and his play approximately Marvin Gaye Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com