Red Dust Road at HOME. Image courtesy of The Other Richard.
Upstaged Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Upstaged Reviewer: Daniel Shipman
Adapted from the memoirs of Jackie Kay by Tanika Gupta, Red Dust Road roams from Kay’s upbringing in Scotland to her first meeting with her father in Nigeria.
The staging is simple, taking place in front of a large picture frame which is moulded in to a tree trunk in one corner. The implication is that the pluralism of Kay’s Scottish and Nigerian identities is ever present throughout her life, but this is conveyed more than adequately through the script which renders the set-piece redundant.
Gupta’s adaptation does away with chronology yet still manages to retain a distinct sense of temporal identity for each distinct phase of Kay’s life. From the shy uncertainty of her school years through to the confidence and strength of her later life, Red Dust Road revolves around the identities which follow Kay through her life, whether they are adopted by her or forced upon her.
Taking the central role of Kay herself, Sasha Frost is excellent. She has to be, as she is on stage for pretty much the entire show, and many of the other characters verge on caricatures at times. The task of embodying Kay at a variety of ages and identities must be a daunting task for an actor, but Frost pulls this off seemingly with ease.
There is, however, one crucial problem with the production as a whole. Whilst it convincingly conveys the facts of Kay’s life, I never once felt any emotional engagement with the events portrayed. This is not for lack of content – growing up as an adopted black child in Scotland through the 1970s must have been incredibly difficult, but this adaptation of Red Dust Road fails to communicate the emotions it would have brought up, or the effect that these had on Kay as she matured.
The show is worth watching for the convincing rendering of Kay’s life but, strangely for a show about a poet, it falls short of ever achieving real poetry.
-Daniel Shipman
Red Dust Road runs at HOME until 21 September 2019.