It’s imminently worth paying attention to Rodreguez King-Dorset, who has to some extent sneaked into town on a mission obviously of grave interest to him, although it may not have the immediate significance stateside as it has had in the UK for some time.
King-Dorset has written, performs and directs Windrush Secret and done a superlative job on each assignment. Indeed, there may be no performance right now on a New York stage better than his. In the solo play, he takes on three roles that couldn’t be more distinct: Marcus Ramsey, a Black Caribbean diplomat; Trevor Smith, a white far-right party leader; and Charles Henry-Williams, a white government official.
The characters are fictional, but surely convincingly representative of participants in a British incident that was nowhere near fictional. It’s a scandal that likely needs explanation here, though no explanation would be necessary throughout England, where King-Dorset has and will continue touring the project.
In 2018 Prime Minister Teresa May engaged in a plan to deport Caribbeans who’d supposedly immigrated illegally over some years. Many, if not all, had arrived on the HMT Empire Windrush liner — hence the name given the episode and the name given the Windrush generation. Curiously, landing cards verifying arrivals and guaranteeing citizenship were missing or (this seems murky) had, worse, been destroyed.
Going into details here beyond what King-Dorset includes may be superfluous for understanding a grueling situation that (unfortunately) happens to be pertinent in this country where deportation talks are increasingly rife, where not only Dreamers but innumerable others are daily left uncertain.
Playwright King-Dorset’s trio perform in three distinct areas on the stage marked by white rectangles approximately 4ftx6ft. Ramsey orates from a lectern. Smith rants up and down from a club chair next to a table on which he has easy access to his drink. Henry-Williams sits at a table holding the file in which the eventually damning information is contained. (No credited set designer; likely it’s King-Dorset.)
As the 90-minute work unfolds, the extremely polished actor alternates the areas, entering and exiting from the back of each, walking slowly and deliberately from one to the next and on entering assuming each character’s quite distinct mannerisms.
Ramsey at stage right is a stentorian, determined public speaker rallying his audience on the rights, on their constantly being wronged, on their obligation to fight for recognition. He’s an accomplished orator who knows how to use his voice and his raised arms to sell his arguments.
Smith, drunk and getting drunker, is a bigot spewing obscenities, not the least the n-word. He spits that one out as if he coined it for just his purpose. His extreme political view might suggest he uses the received pronunciation of the upper-class, but it’s closer to a comical accent heard in a lower stratum. He repeatedly regards Teresa May as “clever,” until he doesn’t.
Henry-Williams is a diligent government worker. He shows no emotion as he deals with his duties. They’re numbers, statistics, nothing about which emotions would be common. He’s a nine-to-fiver merely passing findings to superiors and so expresses himself in appropriately uninflected subordinate tones.
Dorset-King’s handing himself these three disparate figures means a challenge he clearly knew he could meet impressively. Watching him do just that rewards ticket buyers at the same time he adds to an understanding of global deportation circumstances.
The actor-author-director’s Windrush Secret has its many surprises. Several are revealed along the way as to a government’s questionable manipulations — none to be itemized here. But King-Dorset keeps one secret up his commodious sleeve until the end, and it’s a wow. It’s the sort of thing no audience member would ever guess as, simultaneously, it raises the drama’s shock value to additional must-see heights.
