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Ohit’s a cold morning at the Silvertown studio behind London City Airport, the sunshine of Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come is on repeat. Dancers run through a routine filled with reggae and dancehall moves. “Get up,” commands fellow choreographer Neisha-yen Jones with a smile. “I’m sorry!” Ensemble wakes up and dips. They boggle and howl around each other as their caring guide Matthew Xia shaking the head. They circle Natey Jones who delivers the opening line: “Well, they tell me about space.” In the distance, a plane is taking off.
It’s been eight months since The Harder They Come left Stratford East, where the song was so popular that it’s returning for a second run as Cliff’s song. who died in November. Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ based on Perry Henzell’s 1972 Jamaican film inspired by several of his songs and classics including Israel and Wonderful World, Beautiful People – including every number on the film’s main soundtrack. Jones also reprises the role of Ivan (played on screen by Cliff and inspired by real-life criminals. Rhyging), who arrives in Kingston from this country and is fired and employed, before becoming a musician and fugitive. The original was synonymous with cinema vérité, which directly evoked spaghetti westerns and entered the realm of blaxploitation; Ivan’s story has found joy, humor and a rebellious spirit on stage. It was the best song I saw in 2025.
“The story is sad but the theatrical event is a celebration,” Xia says of her production. Twenty years agothe film was adapted as a musical by Henzell’s book, also at Stratford East. “It all started on Ivan’s Nine Nights,” Xia recalls. “On the wall was a big picture of Ivan, everyone was coming, and it was told back with vignettes.” Cliff was a special guest at the press night – he “jumped on stage at the end and sang The Harder They Come” – while Neisha-yen Jones was among the crowd who transferred to the Barbican. Watching music in the audience one night was Shelley MaxwellI just arrived from Jamaica.
“I stopped,” recalls Maxwell, who feels like he’s the orchestrator of the new music. He has mixed the dance styles of revival and pocomania, which he learned as a child, with reggae, dancehall and movements that today’s youth can identify with. He said: “I wanted to take advantage of the youth market. It has brought rave reviews from audiences who may not know the film. “Like: ‘Oh my God, he did what I always do at a party!’ It allows them to form a bond. “
Xia, wearing trainers in the colors of the Jamaican flag, and Maxwell, whose tracksuit has black, green and gold trim, were keen to take their audience straight to Kingston. The opening, says the director, is “a steady draw” with people coming and going on Simon Kenny’s ginificent multilevel set, accompanied by Toots and the Maytals’ hit Funky Kingston. Borrowing from his words, you can trust everything he does. Although every move in the game of dominoes we see is recorded, explains Maxwell, who has successfully mapped the market: “Where are you going?
Xia, whose father came to England from Jamaica in the 1970s, appreciates the film. “Many of the actors were those who were in the market that day, or passing through a small town. Henzell, says Xia, showed “a part of Jamaica that was hidden, people living with their mouths”. The song shows a “quartet of oppression” against Ivan, as he opposes people who represent the fraud of the church, the law, the drug trade and music.
The Harder They Come was both an early example of independent filmmaking for Jamaicans and an icon of an independent nation. Maxwell, who grew up loving Hollywood music, says it was empowering to find a film filled with his favorite Jamaican music. “I may have been very young when I saw it, but what I saw was the world around me.” He also looks at how different genres of music contributed to the country’s identity, from African genres and American R&B to mento, ska, rocksteady, reggae and the rise of Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff. Maxwell explains what happened with the interesting question: “What is this shoot becoming?” When he sees that “dance and music became a big part of how we connected as a culture” he recognizes in Ivan’s story the roots of unemployment and economic inequality, especially “the divide between the lower and upper”, in Jamaica today. Xia said: “His story is Jamaica, 1972. “But the story of a person who goes against the system and gives everything he has to win is for everyone.” Maxwell agrees that: “It is common in the world when it comes to the problems that young people are facing now and what they can do to make a decision.
The song also makes the actions of its hero understandable. “In the film, Ivan plays the role of a brutal killer,” says Xia. In the song, he “accidentally shoots a policeman when he is threatened, he feels sad, but he also knows that if he surrenders it will be the end of his journey”. Another big change is the depth given to the main women – Ivan’s mother Daisy and Elsa, who love him under the eyes of his controlling supervisor, the preacher. “The quality of the piece now resides in the two women,” says Xia. Maxwell transforms a brief sequence from the film, in which Ivan considers experimenting with a devoted Elsa, into a floor-shattering scene when the preacher’s congregation sheds their robes to perform a convincing fantasy. The masculine nature of the first event is clearly visible: “it was supposed to be like both of them in harmony in that fantasy world,” says Maxwell, who adds that the culture of dancehall – “grinding, shaking the other body” required him to use his skills as a director of friendship. “It was about the whole company, making sure they were safe by doing what we could do.”
Xia says that when Parks saw the “indomitable spirit” of actress Madeline Charlemagne in the role of Elsa, she rewrote the ending. When I chat with the playwright on video, she explains clearly about promoting women’s roles: “I have a theory that when you raise one person, they all raise.” Like Xia and Maxwell, Parks likes the film – however she felt that Ivan “was under-recognized because the women in his life were under-recognised, under-sung if you will…
The result is to show that, in Maxwell’s style, Xia’s instructions and Parks’s writing, they can be both joyful and difficult at the same time. “It doesn’t have to be low or high,” says Parks. “It gives you all the ideas.” He imitates the patter of a woman who shows: “You laugh. You cry, you chase him. You are afraid and hide your face. You say: go, go! You say: no, no! As an international group, I think we need to start feeling all the feelings. You have to ask if you are on his side or not. Like the people of the urban sports, No, him. It is both, and everything.
Parks, who also performs with his band SLP is the Sound of Joyhe says “he’s been writing music longer than I’ve been writing plays”. He has just finished a book “which also has music. I like to write music – and I like to find a place to put it”. Xia says Act 1 of the album ended with Jimmy Cliff’s Aim and Ambition but Parks was “so carried away by the energy of the room” that he left and wrote a new number, The Time Is Now. Parks carries a walk-up guitar that he plays during rehearsals with headphones. “I was just playing, looking at them and going, what can fit into this moment? We realized we needed another song to finish the act. It was hard because I had to get it to them the next day…
Although the title number is performed as part of Ivan’s recording, as in the film, there are new arrangements of other songs, including Pressure Drop. Cliff Many Rivers to Cross has been moved toward the end — “it’s what we call in the States our 11 o’clock number,” says Parks, whose change has been seen in previous performances at the Public theater in New York. “Everyone in our show has many rivers to cross.
At the first performance in Stratford, the audience was quick to sing along to the familiar line. “I remember saying to Suzan-Lori, how do we get them to stop doing that?” agrees Xia. “And he said: ‘Why do you want to make them not do that? And I went, you’re right! He’s smart to prevent behavior in the hall. “People say you shouldn’t and you can’t and you shouldn’t? … I think that’s the death of the audience.” He added: “I don’t want mere spectators, I want participants”. (On Xia’s recent Soho production of Dave Harris’s strip-club drama Peace(with Maxwell’s choreography, the actors are given paddles to indicate if they have the chance to “interact” more.)
The crowd at Stratford East has been thriving, says Xia. This former home of Joan Littlewood’s trailblazing company taught her “everything I know about theater – about who’s who, how we make it, why we make it?” And the continuing kind of motivational comments that Joan was making about taking stories that matter to people, putting them on a community stage, and then encouraging the community to know and tell more stories. He first joined at the age of 11 and has been “an audience member, a young company member, an assistant director, a board member for 10 years, a DJ in a bar, I’ve written songs for pantomimes, I’ve adapted plays… It’s home.”
Our latest arrival is sweeter because The Harder They Come is getting a victory instead of a debut. Are the nerves down now? Xia said: “Of course. “Cortisol was higher the first time. ” Most of the original singers are back. On day one of rehearsals, “all the harmony was there” he says. “And even though we went through it sitting down, when we hit the music, they all tapped their feet. Everything was still in the body.
