Raphael Phillips opens up about his difficult experiences as a young, black, queer man trying to navigate the social maze of sexuality and relationships in this intimate and deeply personal one-man show.
Monkeyface, a 70-minute solo piece in which Phillips tackles all of the roles, zooms in on his own experiences, isolated in his university dorm room and feeling as though he does not belong. For Raphael’s character, and presumably for him too, the difficulty of finding his ‘tribe’ while away from home is complicated not just by his sexuality, but by his race too. Phillips struggles to connect with his new, white middle-class flatmates, made more anxious too by a sense that, at the London gay clubs, his identity is a fetish for others, leaving him alone, frustrated and spiralling.
It is an ambitious piece, and one that clearly means a lot to Phillips, finding his voice and advocating for himself, and other young black queer men like him. That said, the piece feels a little sluggish. It is not helped by the fact that Phillips’s character is trapped in a cyclical sense of woe, meaning conversations, anxieties and moments of tension feel repetitive, but this is also elevated in the overall tone of the production, with the script needing a little more redirection here. It is impossible not to feel empathy for Phillips’s character here, stuck in a sparkling, almost too polished, uni dorm room (designed by Valentina Turtur), yet the sense of entrapment does feel a little frustrating. Perhaps this is the point, but tonally the play never really escapes a sense of malaise that makes it quite hard to get into.
The piece does, though, have more success when the action moves out of the room. Conversations between Phillips and flatmate Alice are well-pitched, biting but not too scathing of middle-class Alice who tries, and fails, to understand the protagonist’s woes, though some of the character’s writing feels a little too much of an in-joke, perhaps where the blend between this fictionalised account and Phillips’s real experiences blurs a little too much. Indeed, the piece’s humour peaks and dips throughout, representative of the script as a whole that has a great deal of heart and promise, but could use a little trimming down. There is a lot of pressure on Phillips here to play every character, and while vocally the challenge is risen to with aplomb, the constant switching under Mojola Akinyemi’s direction means moments do not get time to breathe, nor do we get any time to sit and linger with him properly.
Phillips’s eventual burgeoning relationship with young, black, queer Elijah holds promise, but the salvation offered here is also problematic, with lyrics sung at an ACS party homophobic in nature, yet, infuriatingly for Phillips, inexplicably knocked back by other men like him. Elijah is an interesting character development, but he soon slips into a ‘them and us’ ideology that goes nowhere for supporting Phillips either.
Nevertheless, there are some succeeding moments of warmth too. The relationship between Phillips and his worried mother is sweet and empowering, and something that could be explored further. Meanwhile, watching Phillips dance with such isolated confidence during an impulsive trip to Heaven nightclub is a great moment of strength, but one that feels a little undermined by the play’s sudden, unpredictable timeline shifts.
That said, there are plenty of young men with whom Phillips’s story will undoubtedly resonate. It is a play rich with personal intimacy, and with a little more revision of the script and perhaps some weight lifted off Phillips’s performance shoulders, the narrative could, like the dancing protagonist, find its rhythm.
