Northern Arts Review - Tambo & Bones
at the Leeds Playhouse
Tambo & Bones - Northern Arts
Some plays interrogate the world; others interrogate their audience. Tambo & Bones does both—and then leaves the audience in the wreckage. Written by West Philadelphia playwright and poet Dave Harris, this razor-sharp triptych of a play arrived at Leeds Playhouse as part of its 2025 UK tour, following a much-lauded run at Stratford East and multiple awards, including the LA Drama Critics Circle Award for Best New Play. Unflinching, blisteringly intelligent, and wickedly funny, it draws the audience into its grasp only to ask—when does watching become complicity?
The play is split into three acts, each marked by a distinct visual and tonal language. We open in the uncanny artificiality of a minstrel show—a brilliantly jarring set of backcloth countryside, cut-out trees and a plywood sun beaming down on a stage that dares you to relax. Clifford Samuel’s Tambo lies under the “shade of a tall tree”. Daniel Ward’s Bones arrives, hustling for quarters.
The costumes (by Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and ULTZ) are exacting in their period reference—top hats, cutaway coats, spats—deliberately overdrawn and unsettling. What begins as a satire of performance slowly reveals its bite: Bones stabs himself on stage in an attempt to elicit audience empathy. Tambo, existential and weary, becomes reluctantly complicit in Bones’ desire to share in the wealth he is excluded from.
Yet even within this Beckett-esque grotesquery, the play breaks form. A puppet of the playwright is dragged from the audience and cracked open to reveal—quarters. This metatheatrical wink is no mere gimmick; it sets the tone for the next two acts, where the fourth wall fades until it dissolves.
In Act Two, the stage explodes into a riot of light and sound. A fabric backdrop of the American flag falls away to reveal scaffolding, LED rigs and DJ decks. Tambo and Bones are now hip-hop megastars—one part concert, one part sermon. Bones, drenched in gold chains and ego, raps about success while Tambo tries to pivot their platform toward social change. The transformation is dazzling, and the production pulls no punches: the music (Excalibah) slaps, the lighting design (Ciarán Cunningham) veers from euphoric to searing, and the sound design (Richard Hammarton) envelops the room in controlled chaos.
To see my full review, please visit Northern Arts Review
See you in the shadows my loves,
Sean x
