Been So Long

“I want a fella…inside me, all around me let my body be your home” declares Yvonne (Naana Agyei-Ampadu) – a domineering and sexually aggressive woman with what I suppose this musical would call a hell of a lot of junk in her trunk.

Not so great for a family day out then, Been So Long is a modern urban musical with a grinding sound track of funk, jazz, reggae and blues that—when performed by it’s live band of nonchalant brilliance and cast of soul shattering singers—sets the Traverse’s main theatre into fits of slavering fervour. Unfortunately, tacked on to the original score from band leader Arthur Darvill is a plot so base and simplistic as to make the gut wrench.

Che Walker’s book was originally a full length straight play and one can’t help thinking that his larger than life characters’ colourful descriptions of their sexual fantasies—involving satyrs with enormous wooden dicks—would have been less irksome in that more expansive format. Even the initial use of the word “fucking” is enough to cause a little chill to creep down the spine. It’s not that this is gratuitously offensive stuff—there will be many more vivid tales told at the Fringe this summer—it’s just that, stuck with all it’s Rogers and Hammerstein baggage, this genre really isn’t ready for the hard-hitting, tell-it-like-it-is dialogue that Walker inelegantly piles on it.

Indeed, as a distinct hint of well-bred RP threatens to show through the soaring vocals of Harry Hepple’s Gil—a pathetic version of Mike Skinner—you can’t escape the feeling that this would have gone down a lot better at a public school assembly with Hugo guffawing behind his hand whilst gently elbowing Percival in the ribs. Here, comic working-class clichés form part of a happy-go-lucky musical aesthetic that is forced unwillingly to share centre stage with such superfluous phrases as “I had this dream about a bloke with a dick for a tongue.”

It all serves to make sitting through this performance a faintly embarrassing process. It’s a shame because, in concert, I’m sure the performers would be a glass shattering success and, as a play, Been So Long may well be quite moving but when the two come together, the results are far from spectacular.