Review: Deep Azure
in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse @ Shakespeare's Globe until May 2nd 2026
Director: Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu
Writer: Chadwick Boseman
Cast: Jayden Elijah, Selina Jones, Elijah Cook, Aminita Francis & Imani Yahshua
Though best known for screen roles like Jackie Robinson in 42, James Brown in Get On Up and Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Chadwick Boseman began his career in the creative industries as a stage actor, theatre director and playwright. Like many who try to pursue these lines of work, particularly off-Broadway, Boseman’s successes were, with one notable exception, relatively unknown and minor. That one exception is Deep Azure, an avant-garde play written in lyrical verse that premiered in Chicago in 2005, earning a nomination for Best New Work at the Jeff Awards (or Joseph Jefferson Awards, which celebrate excellence in Chicago theatre), and which is now in its final week at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, having been extended by a fortnight due to high demand.
The Globe is an apposite venue for this revival of Deep Azure because for all of his script’s vernacular and modern cultural references, Boseman was a real classicist at heart. The form and structure of the piece comes straight from the annals of Greek tragedy, with its chorus, its fallen heroes and heroines and its recurrent themes of fate, vengeance and the conflict between justice and injustice. The script fizzes with an eagerness and a desire to experiment with the form that is sometimes messy but never boring; even when things don’t quite work, they’re always compelling.
With so much happening on stage and in the script, Deep Azure sometimes loses focus but Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu’s gorgeous direction and the performances do a stellar job of honing things back in on the emotional core of the story, which keeps it rooted in an often gruelling and heartbreaking authenticity. Boseman’s approach to the two central themes of the play - police brutality and disordered eating - is sensitive and intelligent, and his ability to weave all of these ideas into a text written and performed entirely in verse is impressive, not least because it imbues it with a sort of ceaseless momentum as the narrative careers towards tragic inevitability.
It’s a shame that Boseman didn’t write more because this is full of promise. It’s a little overwhelming and needs a bit of a trim but it’s also an emotive and sincere work brimming with all the rage and passion that these subjects deserve. It’s like a sermon, not in that it lectures or hectors the audience but in that it is as much about indescribable feelings and the search for truth and meaning as it is about the story of another black man murdered in cold blood by somebody sworn to “protect and serve”. I just hope more people get to see it because it’s a work of real rigour and intensity.
Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐