Written for The List
Aged 16, Buddy aspires to grow up to become Canada’s Prime Minister. His teacher pooh-poohs the idea: ‘Because your bl …’ He checks himself. ‘I’ve never known a politician as – um – flamboyant as you.’
Buddy’s too camp to be black and too black to be camp. Time and again, he slams up against these twin prejudicial pistons. As a young actor, he can’t fit the casting cliches – leading to an amusing audition for a gangsta role. Caught skipping in the playground aged seven-and-a-half, he’s rechristened Toby, a brand-new ‘slave name’.
With subject matter like this, there’s an inevitably potency; not least because it feels intimate and raw. Nonetheless, the framework and performance register are so stereotypically confessional, Nggrfg feels almost like a teenage diary adapted into an audition piece that demonstrates versatility. Lively though writer-performer Berend McKenzie is, he can’t quite find the things in Buddy’s story that make it a one-off.
In fairness, the stories are better than the often grindingly literal staging, so if you can look beyond the format, it’s not worth striking off entirely.
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