Leeds Playhouse – 6 March 2025
Reviewed by Dawn Smallwood
5*****
Phoenix Dance Theatre’s Inside Giovanni’s Room, part of the Spring Tour, opens at the Leeds Playhouse under the artistic direction of Marcus Jarrell Willis. Based on James Baldwin’s groundbreaking 1956 novel, this World Première production primarily focuses on the human experience struggling with identity, sexuality and personal freedoms in a conforming society. Inside Giovanni’s Room provokes thoughts, reflections and resonances that are importantly applicable today as well at the time when the novel was written.
The company is renowned for its contemporary dance and its repertoire that represent the unique and diverse communities today and presenting Inside Giovanni’s Room is no exception. Baldwin, courageously and confidently explores love, sexuality, identity and vulnerability in his book based on his personal experiences of discrimination.
Set in the Paris in the 1950s, it tells the story of David (Teige Bisnought) who embarks on a troubled journey of self-doubt of himself and sexuality. He is engaged to his girlfriend, Hella, who is currently holidaying in Spain, but in her absence falls in love with Giovanni, an Italian bartender at the gay bar he frequents at.
Giovanni (Dylan Springer), is a troubled soul with a poor background, becomes David’s lover. His room is the focal point in the story and the place where they reaffirm their love and their relationship is deepened passionately. The intimate room, designed by Jacob Hughes, also serves their troubles in their relationship as David battles with his emotions and related trauma and dealing with the reality of being in a ménage á trois involving his girlfriend and lover. This is set to the time when homosexuality was illegal at the time and the pressures of social and society conformity were enormous even at the cost of being true to oneself.
Set to Marc Strobel’s musical composition, Bisnought and Springer, supported by the company’s dancers, are exceptional. Both of their portrayals of David and Giovanni and their individual vulnerability and troubled relationship are depicted in room which is physical and symbolic. Their brilliant synchronicity and fluidity dancing, intricate movements and expressions are sensitively and emotively expressed in their relationship amid consequential fates and surrounding realities.
It offers one a soulful and humane insight how one struggles with identity and having the freedom to be one amid conformity and sadly unacceptable prejudice and discrimination. It is such an amazing and well delivered production which moves, engages, grips and thought provokes from beginning to end. Inside Giovanni’s Room is emancipating which encourages one to freely and openly wonder about the themes that truly matter to one individually and their loved ones.