“I’m singing because I can’t talk this shit anymore.”

“How do I get the mandem to come to the opera?”

This is a question that Renell Shaw has been asking himself ever since he forayed into the form just three years ago. It’s on his mind when I speak to him, as he awaits the opening of Our Eyes Looking for God (Our Eyes henceforth), an opera – now in its final weekend – that he was commissioned to do the music for, made with Northern Opera Group and The Barbican. The opera was written by TD Moyo with a libretto by April Koyejo-Audiger. It follows two Black boys from Toxteth, Liverpool, whose ambitions start pulling them apart, with elements of the state violence they experience placed at the periphery of the story.

The relationship between the Black communities in Toxteth and the state is one that has been marked with state-sanctioned violence and resistance. From systemic racism, aggressive over-policing and neglect, the involvement of state violence in the opera was almost unavoidable. However, what is really interesting here is how it is framed.

The nucleus is joy

Our Eyes sits alongside other recent stage productions such as For Black Boys, Choir Boy; and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, all of which have explored themes of violence and Black boyhood. For Black Boys sees external forces as the problem, so it presents a space for shared camaraderie among boys who experience various forms of violence and explores how they can support each other to overcome it. Choir Boy places the problem within institutions and presents ways boyhood is negotiated and navigated within these spaces. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind sees access, means, and political violence as the problem and highlights the role of community in shaping young boys through these. 

I asked Renell where Our Eyes sits within these conversations. “It’s a play about love,” he says. “It’s about two brothers who love each other deeply.” They are not brothers by blood, but in the way we end up being family through shared communities. 

However, this love does not eclipse the violence. The violence is not denied, but it is not the central motif. “The nucleus of the story is Black boy joy, which is something you don’t see consistently on stages or on television, because that isn’t the narrative that’s entertaining to Western viewers or Western funders.”

(State) violence on stage

The importance of joy cannot be overstated in a world where violence is unavoidable. This is especially true in the UK, where austerity, institutionalised racism, the climate crisis, and complicity in a genocide have made it difficult to avoid the sight of violence in the day to day. 

Making joy the subject of Our Eyes is not about avoiding the violence, but it is simply about not centring it. As Renell explains: “It’s a whisper that’s always there. It’s having to learn about racism younger than you should. It’s having to be aware of police younger than you should.”

He remembers classmates at university discovering the subject of police racism as a debating topic sometime around their 20s, long after he had been living inside it. “By the time they got clued into race and racism and wanted to have debates with me, I was 15 years deep.”

This is the whole problem. For his classmates, the violence is something they can pick up and put down at the end of a seminar. For Renell, and many Black people, it’s a condition that continually follows him. Interestingly, this opera is supposed to serve both of these audiences. 

The difficulty lies with both the audience and the creators on and off stage. “When you grow up a certain way or you are in certain environments, you don’t recognise your experience as complex until you are in a situation that’s safe enough for you to analyse it,” Renell says. “You’re just getting through it.” 

I imagine this is what it’s like for the Black creatives who are forced to reckon with these realities in the rehearsals for this play. They do not leave the complex themes they rehearse at the door when they head home, they carry it with them at all times because it is a part of their lived realities. The production credits Rukiya Jemmot as the production therapist, which tells you that the creators knew exactly what they were asking of the cast and crew.

The rehearsal process forced the analysis on Renell. Weeks of table work, the company sitting together reading and pulling the script apart, sent him back through his own childhood and made him see its shape for the first time. “When you’re trying to just get through, you don’t consider how complex survival is. Violence isn’t always physical. Sometimes it’s deeply psychological, and you don’t even know that until you have the space to stop and say, ‘Whose voice is saying this?’ Is it even me believing this thing I’m saying about myself, or has this been imprinted through something else?”

This is where getting the mandem to the opera goes beyond the material conditions that restrict access to the space. It instead looks at the artistic choices, and how the mandem experience the play once access is granted. This is especially captured in Renell’s choice with the music. 

Letting the script reveal the music

Renell’s choices start with a rule about when music should appear on stage. “I’m singing because I can’t talk this shit anymore,” he explains, saying that he was taught to never put in a song until he has reached the limits of what can be said dramatically. He learnt this from Susie McKenna during his time at Hackney Empire. McKenna is an acclaimed director, writer, and actor, who alongside her prolific career on the West End has also been a mentor to many young creatives like Renell at Hackney Empire through the Artist Development Programme. 

This was incredibly interesting to me, as it led me to think about music within Black spaces generally. Spirituals, the blues, hip hop, kuduro. These are forms that show up at points where speech has been made unavailable, either by law or because nobody with any power is listening. It also got me thinking about the ways these forms communicate music through very distinct emotional, social, and cultural storytelling methods that are specific to their communities. And across these forms, metaphors allow complex truths about traumas and identities to be communicated beyond just entertainment. 

The music for Our Eyes was birthed from concepts that were almost metaphorical. Moyo would tell him a scene needed to feel like water, or needed to feel sandy. And after three years working together, he knows what she means. 

So, he reads the script, and he waits to hear the truths and the music behind the metaphors Moyo presents and turns that into music… or the absence of music. “My instincts were always to let the script reveal the music, rather than going, oh, here’s a violent scene; let’s write ‘violent’ music. I’ve always been someone who trusts the ancestors, and they will tell me when the music is needed and when enough is enough.”

The more interesting part of that to me is knowing when to write nothing. “Silence is as important as sound,” says Renell, a somewhat strange sentiment for someone in his role. Renell mentions how sometimes, we fill gaps and silence with music because we assume the silence must be filled. “But actually,” he continues, “the rawness of allowing the reality to come forward in the absence of music sometimes does more work than using music to lift it. And wisdom is knowing which one is needed when.”

Due to this approach, Renell has stopped referring to Our Eyes an ‘opera’. “I have to call this operatic drama for it to make sense to me. If I just call it an opera, then I’m thinking differently in regard to the rules. Operatic drama creates new rules, and we have to learn them along the way.”

To be clear, this is not him engaging with the form as a problem that needs to be corrected. “My aim has always been to respect the art form, so that regular opera goers can see what they know here but leave space for people who aren’t into opera to come along and see themselves here.” What he wants out of this is the sight of two audiences who would never otherwise share a room talking to each other. 

Having heard snippets of some of the music in the play, I can say that it does, in fact, find a way to blend these two seemingly different worlds. There are upbeat drums, rap, and percussion, mixed in with more classical strings. It is not a rejection of the classic but a refusal to engage with it in a way that keeps it prescriptive and doctrinal. I look forward to seeing what that looks like on stage and what it sounds like in context. 

Blueprints on refusal

Renell’s non-traditional approach to opera is striking to me, and it begs the question: what is the work for? For Renell, it’s a set of instructions. “It’s leaving blueprints for young people to understand themselves and the state of the world, which I don’t think is negative or positive. I just think it’s always dominated by those who get to tell the stories.” 

Show a young person love and joy alongside the pain, he argues, and “then they inherit what I like to call a genuine Black privilege that doesn’t have to be defined by white privilege. What you’re reshaping is your idea of freedom, autonomy and power based on your nucleus, not in contrast to the current state.”

This is very reminiscent of the politics of refusal. Most work made for Black boys teaches about navigation. Be it how to move around whiteness safely, or how to survive among whiteness. These are works that centre the threat, and not necessarily the boys. 

Renell is arguing for a different starting point, where a boy understands himself first and reads the world from there. This refuses to let the state, the violence, the threat set the terms of a child’s life. This is why Renell puts his attention on them: “My focus is always on the children. Those are the impressionable minds, and it’s our duty as artists to help shape the future.”

What this does is instead of centring the hurt and the violence, it chooses to centre the joys. It’s an act of agency in a world that would prefer self-regulation and conformity. It’s refusing politics as usual.

Negotiating access to the opera

The show has taken steps to facilitate inclusion, collaborating with Trybe House Theatre, a London-based arts organisation that supports the mental health, wellbeing, and creative growth of young Black men aged 18-26. Two of the ensemble casts were created for members of Trybe House as a professional access point to the industry.

While these are important steps, this opera is still at The Pit Theatre inside the Barbican, the tickets still cost what they cost. There are still barriers to entry, and whether anyone who walks in will be unsettled by pricing and programming is not entirely within Renell’s control. What he can control is what happens if they do enter. He has spent time making sure the room does not ask them to have any specific cultural context to be entertained or included.

But from my conversation with Renell I’m excited by the possibility of an opera that is approaching the form differently. It seems to encourage silence to allow the audience to feel what they feel without being told how to feel; brings in the music where words can’t suffice and you “can’t talk this shit anymore”, which seemingly means we are listening to singing that is earned and accounted for; and it lets the script reveal the music, which stops the music from dictating the story, and allows the story to serve the music. 

You can watch Our Eyes Watching God until 13th September at The Barbican.