The tortured sould of Marvin Gaye: No sexual healing in this thoughtful, engaging play about the singer, says PATRICK MARMION

By Patrick Marmion for the Daily Mail

Published: 20:06 EST, 26 May 2016 | Updated: 20:43 EST, 26 May 2016

Soul (Royal and Derngate, Northampton)

Verdict: No sexual healing 

Rating:

I had no idea that Marvin Gaye, who wrote and sang the Motown hit Sexual Healing, was also a devout Christian.

And in Roy Williams’s thoughtful, engaging play about Gaye, sex and God turn out to be his Scylla and Charybdis: a lethal twosome that killed him.

Williams’s focus is on Gaye’s early years in Washington DC, doted on by his mother and thrashed by his pastor father. His story is narrated by two sisters, who tell how their brother’s talent flourished singing at church.

But he could never shake off the shadow of his fire and brimstone father, who went on to shoot his son with the gun Marvin Junior gave him for Christmas.

Soul singer Marvin Gaye plays piano as he records in a studio in circa 1974, and he is the inspiration for Soul

Soul singer Marvin Gaye plays piano as he records in a studio in circa 1974, and he is the inspiration for Soul

Williams tells Gaye’s story in a sympathetic way, but families that give guns for Christmas are more seriously dysfunctional than even his story allows.

There is little of the music that made Gaye famous, presumably because the performing rights were not available. Clearly, Williams is not trying to write a jukebox musical, for which he deserves credit. But even with tunes specially written by Gaye’s long-time collaborator Gordon Banks, the absence of those hits leaves a hole.

This is a shame, because James Dacre directs a handsome and passionate period production, stirringly serenaded by a big-lunged Pentecostal choir. After the mean streets of Fifties Washington, Jon Bausor’s set lands us in the stylish ‘Big House’ in LA, where Gaye drifted into a delirium of drug and alcohol abuse.

Nathan Ives-Moiba has a mountain to climb capturing the public charisma and private chaos of Marvin Gaye junior, but he brings energy, sensitivity and a suitable touch of mania to the role.

Leo Wringer is unnervingly inscrutable as his cross-dressing, brutally dogmatic and vigorously hypocritical father. But Adjoa Andoh has swagger and allure as the mother holding father and son together.

Strong meat as it certainly is, the show left me craving a closer connection between the man and his funky, uplifting music.

n Soul moves to the Hackney Empire next month; for details visit soultheplay.com

 

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