Elmina's Kitchen,
National Theatre, London.
RATING: FIVE STARS
Elmina's Kitchen: an angry, provocative, vital play.
Guns, drugs, crime, racism, the effects of single parenthood, the ease with which young black men reject education, the troubled relationship between black Britons and "back home", the frustrated desire to achieve
Kwame Kwei-Armah's play covers an awful lot of bases. What makes Elmina's Kitchen remarkable, however, is his ability to address all these issues without hectoring. He takes us behind the headlines from Hackney's Murder Mile, bringing a human face to London's gang violence and showing how easy it is to make the wrong choice when struggling to survive. Kwei-Armah focuses on three generations of black men: Clifton, who abandoned his wife Elmina before his sons were in their teens; his youngest son Deli, who runs a shabby West Indian restaurant; and Deli's son Ashley, a 19-year-old rudeboy with a burning ambition to own a BMW. In their fraught relationships, we see the depressing domino effect that can occur when a father fails to live up to his responsibilities - be that teaching a son about respect, protecting him when in trouble, or allowing him to improve his life when opportunity comes. Deli may have learned, during his stint in prison, that crime doesn't pay, but he has never successfully conveyed this to his son. Instead, Ashley is seduced by Deli's flash friend Digger, a ruthless criminal with several mobile phones and an outsize ego. Digger is a highly entertaining character, but terrifying, too. His speech de-glamorising gun culture is a brutal warning of how far he is willing to go. There is an inevitability to what follows; even so, when the violence comes, it is devastating. Kwei-Armah writes exquisitely, in a language that is peppery, poetic and full of wit; he articulates each theme without forcing his characters to be artificially articulate. The cast in Angus Jackson's absorbing Cottesloe production don't always do the text justice, not least because their West Indian accents often run awry. As Deli, Paterson Joseph has a habit of rolling his eyes whenever confronted with big emotions. Shaun Parkes, however, perfectly captures Digger's mix of easy humour and menace, and George Harris is deliciously spry as sleazy Clifton, proud to be "coarse as swordfish skin". This is an angry, provocative, vital play, one that demands change in society while recognizing that there are no easy solutions, and is passionately political while understanding that the best way to communicate with people is to keep them entertained. It is thrilling to see it at the National - and will be even more thrilling if it inspires other black playwrights to follow its lead.
Us and Them Hampstead Theatre, London. Rating: FOUR STARS
We
speak the same language, stand united against terror, and are happy to pay a
small coterie of businessmen millions to run our companies. The UK and US
are, it would seem, the very best of friends. In such a climate, Tamsin
Oglesby's play, which promises to puncture any illusions of common ground
with an acerbic dissection of one cross-Atlantic friendship, ought to feel
particularly welcome. The trouble is, the play never lives up to its
billing, not least because Oglesby is far too busy churning out cliches to
muster up anything that might pass for insight. It takes only a brief glance
at the character list
an American couple with a son, a British couple with a daughter - to envisage the entire dramatic arc of the play. Any remaining threat of unpredictability is annihilated by Oglesby's decision to start at the end: with the Yanks announcing to the Brits: "We don't want to be your friends any more." Essentially what she deals in is caricatures: the American couple are forthright, organised and disingenuous; the English are bumbling, well-meaning and repressed. The Americans speak in the language of therapists, take out adequate insurance and get things done; the English are creative (Martin is an inventor, Charlotte a linguist) but fail to live out their dreams. Oglesby eventually digs below the surface, but the revelations - that Lori lacks a sense of belonging, that Martin can all too easily lapse into racism - merely feel as if they have been calculated to fit a set of themes. There are glimmers of what could have been, particularly in a wonderfully modulated Thanksgiving dinner scene, during which Ed delivers a surprisingly sophisticated speech tracing the history of the "war against terror" back to Zarathustra. Listening to this, you wonder how Oglesby could allow her play to descend into a mindless barrage of patriotism and insults.
There are undoubtedly strong performances in Jennie Darnell's stolid, plodding production: Harriet Walter is taut with unexpressed neuroses as Lori; Hugh Bonneville is a breezy, blokey Martin; Siobhan Redmond's Charlotte is winningly scatty and occasionally fierce. It is only Matthew Marsh, playing Ed, who has the opportunity to surprise with his character's unexpected complexity even as he limits himself to the dry, humourless, clipped stance we naturally expect of a rich American businessman. Underneath it all, her point appears to be that the Americans and British are just the same: all descendants of the same folk, all equally obsessed with class. We never would have guessed.-Mady Kosta.