Dreaming and Drowning. Bush Theatre.

Every night for the last 4 weeks first-year English Lit student and supernatural fiction fan Malachi has had the same terrible nightmare. He is floundering in a sea that “feels like lava on my skin” and there is a dark menacing beast submerged and circling in the depths below. Bristol university is supposed to mean “new people, new chapter, fresh start”. But London-born Malachi, who has not had to make new friends since year 7, just cannot convince himself he belongs in a place full of posh white boys and girls dressed in second-hand clothes and pretending to be poor.

Now Malachi’s (Tienne Simon) bedroom walls are developing hairline cracks, there is water pouring in from the room above and the roar of that predatory sea-monster is getting louder. Can a chance encounter with the dishy, silken-voiced economics student Kojo save the lad from drowning in an ocean of anxiety or will “the beast claw its way” out of his dreams?

Kwame Owusu’s coming-of-age, single-hander Dreaming and Drowning makes a decent fist of charting the experiences of a likeable university fresher who is “mad anxious all the time” but dreaming of better things. “Charging through hostile territory, head high”, this is a young man desperately in need of a Queer role-model, something he finds perhaps a little too conveniently in the seductive Kojo. Narrative improbabilities aside, Malachi’s battle to overcome his monster – the overwhelming sense of insecurity, fear, and unease he encounters in his new environment – feels credible, real, and urgent.

The piece loses a little momentum mid-way through and the side characters, particularly the culturally acquisitive white boy Barney who is convinced he understands black culture better than Malachi, feel under-drawn. But Owusu’s writing, at its best pithy, poetic, and viscerally evocative, makes for an engaging 60-minutes. His protagonist’s Aussie seminar leader has “dry skin and yellow teeth”. A predatory drunk he kisses in a barroom “haze of lynx Africa and sweat” has a tongue that “tastes like sick and feels like fur”. Describing Kojo he declares “amber dances and coruscates around his silhouette”.

Owusu coaxes a tremendously physical performance from Tienne Simon as the socially maladroit Malachi. Frantic to escape the confines of his own angst the character bounces from stage corner to corner and, at one point, attempts to scale the rear wall in search of a way out. Holly Khan’s soundscape, ominous strings, and thumping drumbeats, effectively evokes the racing heartbeat and dizzy tension of Malachi’s panic attacks.

Writer:  Kwame Owusu

Director:  Kwame Owusu