Donald Hutera
3 STARS
Whether you regard him as a rap-poet, b-boy or director, Jonzi D is a key player in British hip-hop culture. Breakin' Convention, the annual dance-theatre festival he has curated at Sadler's Wells since 2004, has become a highlight of the spring dance calendar. He's also a savvy talent-spotter who nurtures up and coming artists in his field.
The music industry is the focus of Jonzi D's latest project, particularly in its greediest and most manipulative manifestations. Markus the Sadist is a satirical fable about a naive and nerdy young Londoner (well played by the rising British rapper Bashy) who drops his university studies after winning a rap battle. This willing greenhorn is then swiftly transformed into a bling-sporting, gun-toting global phenomenon whose underlying purpose is, in the words of one string-puller, "to sell shoes to drum tracks".
By the time Markus registers how badly he needs to break out of his ugly, commodified image it is too late. But inevitably, perhaps, his myth lives on.
The production was written and directed by Jonzi D. His smart, playful script follows an arc that could, given the context, safely be called rags-to-bitches. It's mainly delivered in a sometimes rudely funny rhyming vernacular by a versatile cast of eight. Plenty of clever swipes are taken at a business that has no qualms about cultivating sexism, homophobia and violence if it can make money quickly, and a society that happily indulges such practices. Although some of the targets are obvious, at its best the show generates an almost surreal comic high, particularly a video shoot dominated by Rob Broderick's petulant director and a prison scene that slips into slapstick territory. Broderick also merits mention as the Hydra, a power figure with three personalities in one body.
Overall the piece's near-epic ambitions and game sense of humour outweigh its flaws. The biggest of these, at least at the first public showing, was excessive length. The performance I saw had serious teething problems to do with laborious scene changes. An artist of Jonzi D's calibre should make it right in due course.