'Shifters': a Theatre review

As the 9 week run of Shifters, starring Tosin Cole and Heather Agyepong is coming to a close, I felt it necessary to wrap it up with my thoughts of the show.

I was lucky enough to be sat on stage, with direct visibility to both Cole and Agyepong (A12 and A13, if you know you know!), which gave me the perfect opportunity to fully immerse myself in what I was watching; fortunate enough to not have any distractions around me.

For a bit of background, the play is written by Benedict Lombe, and is a beautifully, and quite painfully, realistic journey of Black British love and memory as it travels and bursts through life, spanning over 15 or so years. Reminiscent of a love shared and a love lost, the play is heart-wrenching as it is also a painful reminder that while nostalgia is a beautiful thing, we live in the present - where nostalgia is nothing but a wistful longing and a memory of what once was and what could've been.

It's not exactly a romance, because that connotes a certain theme of giddiness and excitement that isn't necessarily displayed, but the feelings of love that it evokes can understandably make you think as such.

Through laughter, tears and hot scenes of lust and intimacy, materialised via the writing of Lombe and the creative direction of Lynette Linton, you are granted the perspective of teens Dre (Cole) and Destiny (Agyepong) meeting and falling in love in a school when they only had each other for support - through a uniquely British lens.

On the subject of being British, class is an interesting theme that came up in the play. Despite having the shared experience of being Black, for Dre, coming from a working-class background while Des had a middle-class one with a father as a neurologist, there was an extra layer to peel back for the both of them to come together as one.

You are constantly carted between past and present, deserving the title of Shifters, you are able to see just exactly how their chemistry and love develops, intensifies, ebbs away and is sparked up again. I let out breaths I didn't even know I was holding throughout the play, and like many others I'm sure; Dre and Des' story mirrored mine in ways I didn't even think about until it was placed directly in front of me. Willing or not, it forces you to look at your past situations, to really analyse and reflect on where things went wrong and what you could've done to better handle - or even just avoid - certain issues in the first place.

Dre and Des were reunited by loss, and as ugly as the feeling of grief is; especially the bereavement of someone who held such an important place in your life, you recognise that sometimes, there can be something releasing about it. Whether this be finding out more about the person the person you loved from a completely different perspective, or reuniting with a lost connection; you find that sometimes the ugliest things can create something beautiful.

Whether or not the play had your quintessential 'happy ending' is definitely up to the opinion or the viewer, but I believe it was a realistic one, and I think that's what makes the play just that much more beautiful. As the minutes go by, its almost as though you're waiting for the end so that you can see them end up together, waiting for the circle to complete itself and restore what was once hole. But as fiction as it is, it's a depiction of real-life and thus needs to present itself in that way.