Glad I caught the fascinating Tambo and Bones at Stratford East yesterday, having missed it first time around. Dave Harris’s play is the opposite of the earnest, issue-based theatre we’re often served — a rumbustious tumble through the history of Black American consciousness. It begins with two minstrels enacting routines in a faked field. Bones attempts to earn “quarters” through demeaning performances, until Tambo suggests that giving a speech about race might bring in more. This section owes a clear debt to Waiting for Godot, and Tambo’s speech tackles the appalling “logic” of transatlantic slavery (that Black people weren’t real people), as well as the strange phenomenon of actual Black minstrels — Black performers donning blackface to entertain white audiences.

What follows is a blast of metatheatrical mayhem, as the duo spot the playwright (a puppet) in the audience and assault him for making them perform such degrading material. The play then cuts to a contemporary setting where the pair are a wildly successful hip-hop act — Bones content to rake in dollars through gangsta clichés, Tambo still driven to “change the world.” From there, the piece goes off-road: real estate investments, military tech, and a raging civil race war. The pièce de résistance is the second act, set 400 years into a twisted version of Afrofuturism — a world apparently built after an atrocity. The two now lecture the audience like primary school teachers, aided by two white robots. When the robots begin to develop a sense of selfhood, old tropes re-emerge. The final stretch is disquieting and deeply provocative.

It’s a real relief to see a play which doesn’t deal in carefully constructed arguments and structural clarity, but instead is a carnivalesque set of provocations and oneiric visions. Clifford Samuel and Daniel Ward are a brilliant double act as Tambo and Bones — funny, moving, angry, charming and chilling by turns, and Jaron Lammens and Dru Cripps give spellbinding displays of clownery and body-popping skills as the robots. Matthew Xia’s production is beautifully uninhibited and skilled at holding all of the disparate elements together; it feels of a piece with his splendid version of Genet’s The Blacks at the same venue some years ago. He pulls off the denouement’s devastation beautifully. A real relief to find a play which doesn’t peddle in easy answers or sanctimonious platitudes.