Deep Azure review – musical marvels in Chadwick Boseman’s hip-hop tragedy

The Black Panther actor’s melding of social commentary and Shakespearean themes is sometimes opaque yet undeniably poetic

Chadwick Boseman was not only an accomplished actor and Marvel superhero before his untimely death in 2020. Perhaps best known as T’Challa in Black Panther, he was also a writer – and this 2005 play bares all the lost promise of his talents.

It is an ambitious, sprawling, music-filled story of a Black woman, Azure (Selina Jones), mourning her fiance, Deep (Jayden Elijah), who has been killed by a police officer. Inspired by the 2000 death of a university student, Prince Jones, it splices the theme of police violence in the US with a Shakespearean plot of jealousy, injustice, revenge and grief.

The last of these is explored through a powerful portrait of Azure’s eating disorder alongside the reactions of Deep’s friends Tone (Elijah Cook) and Roshad (Justice Ritchie). Jones is astounding in the intensity of her performance, in her character’s anguish and interludes of movement.

The play is a rich blend of hip-hop, song and verse, the language Shakespearean, too, in its lyricism. It was partly inspired by Shakespeare’s poetry and features snippets of his writing (such as the “too too solid flesh” soliloquy from Hamlet). The central storyline on avenging (or otherwise) the unjust death of a loved one traces that of Hamlet itself.

The details around Deep’s death are initially opaque and Boseman’s experimental narrative appears deliberately abstruse, jumping from modern-day America to tsarist Russia, Rasputin and the enactment of a caterpillar chrysalis transforming into a butterfly. There are also satirical riffs on TV culture (such as Jerry Springer) and consumerism by a chorus.

Dynamically directed by Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu, this ensemble has a vital presence as they beatbox, rap, sing and dance, although they are another puzzle of the piece, dressed in space-age costumes at the beginning, later turned into the marching-band members of a fictional university that Deep attended. They are human or not, as required, becoming parts of a car or cooing pigeons.

There are times when the narrative grows too arcane to follow, the various strands seeming disparate and diversionary. The play pulls out some shocking twists and is faster, smoother and less perplexing in the second half, when its puzzling parts come together.

It is complicated in its non-naturalism, but that is no bad thing. The play is packed with ideas, and there is a surrendering pleasure in submitting to its strange logic and poetic richness.

• At Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, until 11 April.