Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle, review: Lenny Henry gave a terrific performance in this short, sharp monologue
The penultimate episode of Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle, BBC Four’s series of 15-minute monologues following one family from the Windrush generation in one London front room across 70 years, came full circle. We’d first met Cyrus in episode two, when he had recently arrived from the West Indies. Now, 60 years later in 2011, there were riots outside the house.
In Cyrus’s mind, fragmented by dementia, the riots were alternately from Lewisham or Brixton or any of the many other uprisings he’d witnessed in his long life where black youths had protested against government and the police. Cyrus was by turns angry and confused, both at his failing mind and that not enough had changed in half a century for black men like himself living in Britain.
This elder Cyrus was played by Lenny Henry and it was a terrific performance, concentrated in to a short, sharp 15 minutes. The Soon Gone series has shown, surely, that in the age of binge-watching and TV series expanding like bloated puffballs, there is a place for a punchy palette cleanser. You’d get more out of a single dose of Soon Gone than 14 weeks of MasterChef, for example.
As it happened the finale wasn’t quite as strong. The first few minutes got lost in a baffling set-up that had teenager Michaela (Olivia-Mai Barrett) making a video essay for her sociology course. With, apparently, several cameras, professional lighting and a tight script. Anyway, if that was a minor distraction Michaela soon hit her stride. Her real subject was also the subject of the whole Soon Gone series: identity and belonging. Micheala had always considered herself as black but looked white.
She referred back to her great grandmother Eunice – who we met in the first episode in 1949 – and it turned out that Eunice loved her pale skin: “I was the embodiment of her dream… the blackness had gone.”
Michaela’s monologue therefore swung in to an investigation of her whole family, and thus a retrospective on the series itself, which has focused on the family members through the years. Michaela’s face, filmed in close-up like so much of Soon Gone, became emblematic of how Caribbean identity is disappearing from the UK. Perhaps this series will help keep it alive for a little longer.
