The play that changed my life: ‘Arinzé Kene’s Misty interrogated society and trusted the audience’

This one-man play started out as one story and broke into another, commenting on the first. It was a wake-up call

A few months before I saw Arinzé Kene’s Misty at London’s Bush theatre in 2018 I’d spent the summer in Edinburgh where I watched a lot of confessional, one-person shows. There is a huge amount of privilege in being able to stand up as a solo performer and say, I’m going to hold your attention for an hour and just tell you my story. These shows seemed to be the preserve of middle-class white people, with some fairly strict rules about what makes a good one.

Misty was not a confessional; it was a sort of interrogation of our society via the medium of a one-person show about a black man in London. It opens with this extraordinary soundscape and someone on stage performing a monologue about being on the night bus. You get into the swing of the piece and you understand that it’s going to be about gentrification and the experiences of this young black working-class man who gets into an altercation. And then the piece breaks.