Review: Princess and the Hustler – Bristol Old Vic

Original Review for Broadway World UK

Black, beautiful, and brilliantly funny

Beauty pageants and bus boycotts seldom belong on the same page, but in Chinonyerem Odimba’s joyously playful and beautifully played Princess and the Hustler, they’re brought together by Princess James, a flamboyant young girl who is black, beautiful, and brilliantly funny. Odimba’s play, also black, beautiful, and brilliantly funny, focuses on an oft-forgotten and unforgivable time in Bristol’s past, the Bus Boycott of 1963, and is part of theatre collective Eclipse’s ground-breaking programming of Black British narratives.

As the sister to Junior, a nascent photographer engaged in the fight for civil rights, with her no-nonsense mother Mavis only just earning enough to finance her family and her estranged father knocking on the front door with a new daughter in tow, Princess’s narrative is overflowing with new-fangled influences. Yet, it centres on Princess’s natural hair as much as her city’s history,