Alex Wheatle’s YA novel Crongton Knights comes to Brighton stage
The result is Crongton Knights which plays Brighton Theatre Royal from Wednesday, March 4-Saturday, March 7. It comes from Pilot Theatre.
The play – the stage premiere of Alex Wheatle’s award-winning young adult novel – comes promised as a night of madcap adventure as McKay and his friends, The Magnificent Six, encounter the dangers and triumphs of a mission gone awry.
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Hide AdBringing the pulse of the city alive on stage is a soundscape of beatboxing and vocals laid down by the cast and created by musician Conrad Murray.
Olisa Odele is playing Mackay in the piece.
“It is set in Crongton which is not a real place. It is like a mixture of Brixton and Birmingham. It is like any kind of inner city that you can think of. It is imagined. A lot of different places have come together to create Crongton. It is a multicultural place. You have got the estates and the brand-new builds, and people live there side by side. You have got people of all sorts of different backgrounds.”
Crongton Knights is about the friends you’ll never forget and how lessons learned the hard way can bring you closer together.
In addition to Olisa, Crongton Knight’s cast will feature Kate Donnachie (Sirens, Edinburgh Fringe) as Bushkid; Zak Douglas (National Youth Theatre), Simi Egbejumi-David (Sh*t-Faced Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet, Magnificent Bastard Production and Around the World in 80 Days, Kenny Wax Family Entertainment & Simon Friend) as Festus; Nigar Yeva (Give Me, Soho Theatre) as Saira; Aimee Powell (Freeman, Strictly Arts and Over The Too, Belgrade Theatre) as Venetia; Khai Shaw (The Lion King, West End, Little Baby Jesus, Orange Tree Theatre ) as Jonah and Marcel White (Freeman, Strictly Arts) as Nesta.
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Hide Ad“McKay has lost his mother and his life is falling apart,” Olisa explains. “His older brother and his dad are having a bit of a war. The show centres around McKay. He is very brotherly. He likes to cook. He wants to be a chef. He is very much a people’s person. You never see him alone. He navigates between a bunch of people. He is very sociable. He is a unifier. He has got his best friends and he unites them with some girls, and we are a gang.”
But a fun gang, Olisa is quick to stress. Not a threatening gang.
“This is the most positive kind of gang there is. This is a group of young people together. They find themselves united. Something has happened to one of the girls, and they find themselves on a mission. We are all from South Crongton in the show, and there is a North Crongton, and there are rival gangs. We end up journeying around them and through them. The background is that there is a kind of war going on between north and south, and we are journeying through that war.
“When we started rehearsals, there were no songs, but in the first week of rehearsals we wrote eight songs for the show. It’s is r’n’b and grime and hiphop, that kind of influenced background. Each character has quite a unique sound depending on who they are. There is a bit of something in there for everyone. My character is very much pop r’n’b and Afro beats.”
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