A TROUSER-LEG TSUNAMI AND A COATHANGER DREAM
They came off the boats: a Windrush generation, wanting to work and live in cold strange Britain. In an upper room Walker does alterations: piecework, taking on anything beause he’s driven, ambitious for a shop of his own where he would make real “suits” and be a creator and craftsman, more than a drudge. Arinzé Kene , always star-quality whether in musicals or plays, gives him a manic energy and unsettling passion to “start life” , without noticing that in the process he risks wrecking it. He’s assisted by Buster (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) a likeable soul who likes work but doesn’t take it as passionately hard, and young Courtney, who drives deliveries and is disillusioned about life in Britain.
Meanwhile Horace, a natty dresser , charmer and joker, also works there when he can be bothered but takes life more lightly: a character which Karl Collins creates with brilliant humour (never forgot him as Uncle Vince in Nine Night) When “Mr Nat” , a more prosperous Jewish immigrant from an earlier era turns up with an enormous load of trousers to be altered by five next day, of course Walker takes it on. He’s ready to work all night: something which becomes even more necessary when after a few hours Horace wanders off and they find with horror that all his work needs unpicking.
The play then draws tightly, claustrophobically, into manic workplace banter and labour and exhaustion, broken sometimes by Cherrelle Skeete as Walker’s fed-up wife Darlene, raising his daughter, thwarted by losing her own job, and thoroughly sidelined by his desperate ambition. There are some touching moments with Kene when their old closeness is visible but the temptation of happy Horace is, in the end, too great. The other most moving moments are, after her defection, between Walker and Colin Mace’s quiet, sad Mr Nat . Who tells him that he too lost his wife to headlong business ambition, and is left with only “business acquaintances”.
It is good that the Black Plays Archive preserves the work of people like the late Michael Abbensetts, recording struggles like these , getting us away from the frequent gangster /racism-victim / angry-rebel depiction to record in drama the ordinary lives, idiosyncrasies, struggles and triumphs of the British- Caribbean diaspora. Lynette LInton, who leads the Bush and gave us the brilliant “Blues for an Alabana Sky” in this theatre, directs with energy. But it’s slow-burning, the first half-hour moving nowhere much beyond some entertaining banter. And to run it unbroken for just under two hours feels like a mistake. Some surreal sequences where great rows of hangers approach from above and beside the weary tailor, caging him in his own dreams, are wonderful though (Frankie Bradshaw design). And there was a lot of laughter on press night (though some of the Creole- patois gags I suspect went over my head). Kene and Collins are both wonderful. But I wanted it to be more engaging than it is, and it needs to lose ten minutes or so.
nationaltheatre.org.uk to 5 April
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