Dreamscape at Arcola Theatre Review

Content warnings: descriptions of a violent death by multiple gunshots.

---

Dreamscape is a 75-minute piece of Hip Hop theatre written and co-directed by Rickerby Hinds, alongside co-director Mxolisi Masilela. It is based on the true story of Tyisha Miller, a 19-year-old Black woman killed by four California police officers in 1998 in Riverside, in the Inland Empire of Southern California. The show won a Fringe Theatre Award at Edinburgh Fringe 2025 and now arrives at the Arcola Theatre for a limited run.

Hinds grew up near where the incident took place. He said he “had no option but to write this play”, returning to the story five years later in the context of escalating police violence in the US in 2003. 

The play alternates between the cold clinical language of a coroner's report and the vivid inner world of Myeisha Mills, the fictionalised version of Miller. Each of her twelve bullet wounds is read out in legal detail, drawing an uncomfortably clear picture, and each is met with a memory, a feeling, a moment from her life. The contrast is stark and striking. 

The Arcola's Studio 2, surrounded on three sides by the audience, suits the piece perfectly. Myeisha addresses the room from the start, and the intimacy of the space makes that feel entirely natural.

Kim Blanché Adonis is outstanding as Myeisha. She dances, raps, delivers monologues, and addresses the audience throughout, all in rhyme, all with an impressive ease. She has spoken of seeing herself in the character, and it shows.What makes her performance so affecting is the portrayal of youthfulness and the character’s expectation for her own life. Myeisha speaks of reaching 56, tells the audience to watch out for when her cousin becomes a star. Through glimpses of her world, her dancing, baseball, and childhood memories, you grow attached to her, knowing she is already dead.

Kgwadi Tshwarelo Selolo as the Coroner and Beatboxer is a strong presence, accompanying Adonis with beatboxing and embodying the clinical detachment of the legal process. A couple of minor stutters do nothing to affect the overall performance.

The play is centred entirely on Myeisha's life. The words racism and police violence are never spoken, and the script doesn't specify what happened to the officers who killed her. The political weight accumulates in detail, through Myeisha's own experience of race and colourism. The decision to keep her as a girl, a human being, and not a martyr, makes the play all the more moving. 

The play is brilliantly written and performed. You leave with a sense of anger and loss for what could have been, yet strangely uplifted by the sheer hopeful liveliness of Myeisha herself.

Dreamscape runs at the Arcola Theatre until 8 August.

★★★★★

---

Reviewed by Alex, 31 July 2026.