Surely no longer will Zawe Ashton’s talents as a playwright be a secret. While she treads the boards in Pinter’s Betrayal on Broadway, the Fresh Meat star’s fourth play gets its premiere at Hackney Showroom. It’s an eerie, poetic, often abstract study of the ways the world can send black women mad, which in its most dark and visionary moments has shades of Sarah Kane.
“I don’t want to tell today,” says a woman from Greek-chorus-like group The Flourish, with the exhaustion of trying to explain their experiences anew each day. When a woman jumps out of a window, they repeat like a mantra: “What makes a grown woman jump?” At the centre is Joy, in an affecting performance by Mina Andala, losing her grip, trying to exist in systems not set up for people who look like her. She tries to get a promotion. Her body unexpectedly swells with pregnancy. She finds stones in her coat pockets. In Jo McInnes’s haunting production, The Flourish are always watching, often distressed.
An atmospheric set brings in the night, with a window framing a staircase, hinting at the idea of the mad woman in the attic. But the play might benefit from a more intimate space; the acoustics occasionally swallow up the dialogue.
For all the poetry, there’s an unevenness in quality, with an alternating scene structure that’s constraining. Ashton’s voice feels most vital when, in all its howl and gasp-inducing vividness, it taps into an imagination that feels unique. This play took 11 years to be staged; I’m glad it has been. It is worth asking why it took so long.
Until November 9 (020 3095 9747, hackneyshowroom.com)
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