One Love: The Bob Marley Musical, Birmingham REP - review

For all the song lyrics you know, the face that adorns a million t-shirts…actually, the story we hear or, perhaps, choose to hear, is quite different.

And that is probably what I will take away most from this musical history lesson full of hits and laughs.

It is brave. Very brave. It takes a global superstar synonymous with a whole movement and says you know what; he actually wasn’t that nice a guy. He could be controlling, manipulative and certainly didn’t like not getting his own way.

But behind all the rock star behaviour – the drug taking, womanising and lying – was a heart of gold and stubborn drive that simply wanted one thing. He wanted to see his beloved Jamaica united.

Set against the backdrop of civil strife that laid siege to his country, One Love tells the story of how a band of friends led by a singer ‘too black to be white and too white to be black’, who for reasons of skin colour and just the part of the island he hailed from struggled to get airtime.

Yet he persevered through rows and The Wailers splitting and became the hottest of property. Marley, played brilliantly by Dutch/Surinam singer and actor Mitchell Brunings who finished second on The Voice of Holland in 2013, grew to be the poster boy of a nation. And this wasn’t lost on its warring political factions. Stuck between Prime Minister Michael Manley (Adrian Irvine) and his CIA-backed Capitalist rival Edward Seaga (Simeon Truby), he is never just left alone to get on with it.

It is pressure that drives him away following a failed assassination attempt. And living in the ‘bloody cold’ climes of London, we follow his strife and fallings out as he brought the world arguably his greatest work – Exodus.

It is here we learn the true strength of his wife Rita – the superbly watchable Alexia Khadime – and lovers of strong female characters will jump right behind her battle to fend off suitors including Miss World Cindy Breakspeare (Cat Simmons) and bring her Lion home. And friend and muse of sorts Pablo (Natey Jones) breaks up the rows and tension with the comic relief.

It culminates with that most famous of gigs, where Bob is convinced to return home and play a peace concert for his adoring people. It was here he brought Manley and Seaga together in that iconic photograph, and when he turns to the audience to get them on their feet for a medley of his hits the political tension is shattered in one giant party where the ensemble cast join us in the aisles for a sing and dance.

A fittingly happy end to this part homage, part history lesson that teaches you so much more than you expect. It is worth picking up the program, too, for extra reading around the political setting and just to remember that music is the great unifier of even the staunchest enemies.

It is unpolished in places. Lines were stumbled and scene changes skewed. But in some ways, he would have liked the rawness. The audience who tramped out at the age certainly had nothing but One Love for what they had just witnessed.