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ToolsSix, Tom (2025) Abolish the Stage: Reflecting on Race and Theatre in Tambo and Bones. Contemporary Theatre Review Print ISSN 1048-6801 Online ISSN 1477-2264, 34 (3). pp. 404-409.
Abstract
This long review of Matthew Xia's production of Dave Harris' bTambo and Bones argues that we should abolish the western stage. I observe that, by repeatedly placing frames around its action that it goes on to break, the play offers a fundamental critique of the interdependent development of western theatre and the technology of race. After a reading of Harris and Xia's dramaturgical critique of racialization, I propose that if Stuart Hall was right and 'race works like a language', it functions even more like a theatre, in which bodies are always being scrutinized for signs of meaning of which the audience is the ultimate arbiter. This, I argue, is the structural logic of race: signs of difference are invested with significance thanks to behavioural scripts authored by dominant racialized groups. But this is not the logic of all theatre. The essay concludes with a brief consideration of an alternative: Robert Serumaga’s twentieth-century Ugandan theatre company Renga Moi, which I offer as an example of a form of theatre-making that could be considered an aesthetic corollary to Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition of abolition as 'life in rehearsal'.
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