Is “remorse” a word that anyone actually uses in everyday spoken language? Or “discord”? Are 16-year-old school leavers, in particular, known for a tendency towards this sort of vocabulary? Quite possibly I’ve been moving in the wrong circles but I struggled with the register of Arinze Kene’s script, presented here in a co-production with Talawa, from the very start. By the climactic revelation, in which spilt blood is an “ever-growing pool of claret”, I had quite given up all esperance.
It’s a great pity that no one helped Kene to strip his writing of the stagy self-consciousness of a bad Britflick. Lines such as “We don’t need yer sashaying through Deptford dressed in yer long humiliations” convince no one and there are some elementary playwriting errors involving characters laboriously telling each other things they surely already know, simply to fill us in on the back-story.
Not only is Kene distracting us with all this, he’s pulling his own focus as well, because the story he has come up with has terrific potential.
Sashaying or not, we’re certainly in Deptford, in 1982, with the aftershock of the Brixton riots still felt. Chima (Kingsley Ben-Adir), estranged mixed-race son of an Irish mother and Nigerian father, returns to the family home after what we soon deduce was a lengthy spell in prison.
To his horror, his younger brother Onochie (Ash Hunter) is now a teenage skinhead, complete with turned-up jeans and DMs, who barely recognises him. Mum, unseen, appears to have done a runner that very afternoon. Onochie, who has only white friends, wants nothing to do with the person he claims has brought shame on the family.
The lengthy opening scene between the brothers threatens to run out of steam, but Michael Buffong’s occasionally static production is greatly enlivened by the arrival of the vivacious Holly (Ria Zmitrowicz, turning in easily the best performance of the evening).
One of the reasons wannabe songwriter Onochie is fond of his girlfriend is that she’s “handy with the metaphors”; this nonsense aside, it’s a touching fledgling relationship in which we can wholeheartedly believe.
Ellen Cairns’s expressive set has a lino and Formica-dominated kitchen trailing off into crumbling masonry. Yet despite the soundtrack of barking dogs, I wasn’t entirely convinced there was a community, hostile or otherwise, waiting for Chima outside that front door.
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