And then there’s the particular circumstance of the Windrush arrivals; British subjects, shunned and racially abused – the bottom of the pile for housing and jobs.
Trinidad author Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners offers a lyrical, contemporary chronicle of what that felt like – here sensitively adapted by Roy Williams, and beautifully directed by Ebenezer Bamgboye featuring expressionist dance-like movement.
The treatment suits this plotless story about the desires and emotions of a group of men ‘liming’, looking for work, catching pigeons in the park, and sleeping with prostitutes to assuage their loneliness.
On a bare stage, backlit by glaring lights, it foregrounds the psychology and interactions of Big City, (Gilbert Kyem Jnr) Lewis (Tobi Bakar) and Moses (Solomon Israel), a jaded old timer with a poetic bent, who acts as unofficial social worker for new arrivals.
They include Romario Simpson’s sunny, chipper Galahad, fresh off the boat with just a toothbrush and pyjamas, who soon gets the stuffing kicked out of him, is deserted by his white girlfriend, and starts to internalise the prejudice into anger and self-hatred.
Moses is haunted by the pregnant girlfriend he abandoned in Trinidad, as Aimee Powell’s Christina haunts him with lilting songs and memories of caresses.
Big City, who comically mispronounces London placenames yet knows his way around, is lured into a failed Post Office stick up.
And Lewis turns to drink and domestic violence when he’s unable to find a job to support newly arrived wife Agnes and mother Tante.
Notes of toxic masculinity are underlined by the more liberating experience of immigration for these two, proud women who break into a joyful dance, and go toe to toe with insulting Londoners – we hear their half the interaction, and can guess the other.
The glaring lights and thumping music are sometimes at odds with the more contemplative mood, and terrific movement sequences which depict both violence and lovemaking.
Despite their struggles and disenchantment, there’s a hopeful note of mutual support and survival in a final moving sequence which sees each man slump, or fall to be picked up by the group.
And Israel’s saddened Moses takes bittersweet pleasure at living at ‘the centre of the world’ and in the changing seasons of his adopted country.
The Lonely Londoners runs at Kiln Theatre until February 22.
