'The Purists' review — worlds collide in this dynamic play about rap, musical theatre, race and grief

Read our review of The Purists, a new drama by Dan McCabe, now in performances at the Kiln Theatre to 21 December.

A DJ called Mr Bugz (Richard Pepple) spins tracks for an excitable audience, following which we are introduced to the inhabitants of a home in Sunnyside, Queens, and a musical theatre devotee called Gerry (Jasper Britton) with an evident fondness for The King and I. We first hear that classic show’s “Getting to Know You”, before we have got to know Gerry himself.

And so one senses from the off the multiple worlds that intertwine, overlap and sometimes collide in the American writer Dan McCabe’s play. The Purists is now having its UK premiere as part of Amit Sharma’s debut season running the Kiln, whose previous artistic director, Indhu Rubasingham, has decamped to the National.

The play was premiered in 2019 at the Huntington Theatre in Boston under the directorial eye of Billy Porter, the Tony winner (Kinky Boots) and burgeoning fashionista whose own celebrity straddles the various cultures that get anatomised here.

On the one hand, The Purists depicts a life spent in theatrical thrall – the sixtysomething Gerry, cantankerous but also caring, is a kindred spirit to Man in Chair, the musicals obsessive at the questing heart of the sort of musical, The Drowsy Chaperone, you feel Gerry might love. He’s a juicy role that the protean Britton tears into with abandon.

But racism, sexual misconduct, and familial grief soon take their place centre stage in a busy narrative that keeps numerous plates spinning across an overlong two acts possessed of just enough revelatory hooks to keep an audience on side.

Opposites attract, and so it is with the drugs-friendly Gerry, who is drawn towards Mr Bugz in ways that extend beyond neighbourly interest. The play unfolds on a multi-tiered set designed by Tom Piper that allows the action to shift from a gig of sorts to the front-porch drama so beloved in the American repertoire. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons comes to mind by way of comparison in a play that evokes many and varied other titles along the way.

Bugz has an (unseen) mother who is dying, and whose lingering presence he can’t quite escape. His emotional frailty finds its opposite in the fortysomething Lamont (Sule Rimi, outstanding), a onetime rap legend who looks on at a younger generation of women and their own proficiency at an art form that may be neither as Black nor as male as we necessarily expect.

Emma Kingston’s Nancy, herself a generation younger than her beloved Lamont, shows up with grand ambitions for a female-centred rap musical all her own, leaving the Puerto Rican Val (Tiffany Gray) to opine on footwear – which is itself crucial to the schisms that come to define the play's second half with more than a nod to August Wilson.

Not long out of Juilliard, McCabe conveys a generous-hearted awareness of the dramatic canon, sufficiently so that you wonder at times what might happen if he shed some of this play’s obvious influences and worked more intuitively from scratch.

Still, this is a bustling play that knows what buttons to push and when. And at its rousing conclusion on opening night, it was hard not to feel that the sense of occasion generated onstage was set to continue in the foyer. For all I know, they're dancing there still.

The Purists is at the Kiln Theatre to 21 December. Book The Purists tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: The Purists (Photos by Marc Brenner)