Retrograde is a play about principle—but also about fear. It asks what it costs to hold onto yourself when the world offers you a glittering version of someone else. And, more painfully, it asks who is left to bear the weight of your choices when the lights go down and the door closes.
Ivanno Jeremiah is nothing short of captivating as Sidney Poitier. His performance is sharp, vulnerable, and unshakably dignified. He plays a man who stands at a crossroads—one path leading to comfort, the other to conscience. Stanley Townsend’s Mr. Parks is both repugnant and magnetic, a master manipulator whose venom is masked by a gentleman’s grin. Oliver Johnstone’s Bobby brings an eerie fragility to the room, a man whose own compromises expose the insidious danger of quiet betrayals. Together, they form a triumvirate of tension, ideology, and theatre at its most combustible.
Amit Sharma’s direction masterfully frames the stillness. Every silence breathes. Every moment lands. Frankie Bradshaw’s set is elegant and brutal in equal measure, a Hollywood office that, under the weight of words, transforms into something more like a courtroom—or a cage. Amy Mae’s lighting is exact and striking, bathing characters in interrogation beams or slipping them into sudden shadow. Beth Duke’s sound design hums beneath the surface, tightening like a noose.
This play dissects, with brutal precision and aching care, the fragile relationship between systemic oppression and personal values. Through electrifying portraits of sweaty faces flushed red—red with fury, pain, and silent, smoldering rage—the protagonist exposes the delicate balance between strength and vulnerability, submission and revolt, moral conviction and a world steeped in corruption.
At its core, Retrograde wrestles with the paradox of consequence that arises from a single moral compass. The same principles that urge him not to betray a friend—a brother-in-struggle—are also those that compel him to protect his family: his wife, his daughters, the fragile architecture of his home.
The play also explores, with unflinching honesty, the tension between one’s role in the intimate theatre of everyday life—within family, among friends—and one’s potential impact on the grand stage of history. Sometimes, one must leap in faith, guided not by logic but by the trembling certainty that a higher moral order exists—intrinsic to the human soul—and that it reveals itself, luminously, wherever even a crumb of courage remains.
This is how great figures are made. How history turns, how its gears catch, grind, and shift. How revolutions happen—not always in grand parades or trumpet blasts, but in quiet rooms, behind closed doors, in the fragile, silent heroism of choosing principle over survival.
We see the struggle etched onto the protagonist’s face—a portrait both tender and unrelenting, holding together the countless shards of human emotion: oppression, the longing for liberty, honour, despair, dignity, beauty—and horror.
There are no easy answers here. Only the haunting echo of a decision that shaped not just one man’s life, but the future of representation, resistance, and truth.
Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue
Writer: Ryan Calais Cameron
Director: Amit Sharma
Cast: Ivanno Jeremiah, Stanley Townsend, Oliver Johnstone
Running time: Approx. 1 hour 45 minutes (no interval)
Until: 14 June 2025
Running Time: 90 mins (no interval)
Photo credit: Marc Brenner